released 1/17/2020

Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. One of Scruton’s last books was Music as an Art, in which he examined the place of music in human experience and in the cultural order of the West. In this Friday Feature, Scruton talks with Ken Myers about the necessity of making musical judgments, about the relationship between music and dance, and about the relationship between silence and music.

32 minutes

PREVIEW

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Related reading and listening

  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 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)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism” that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel’s Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel’s time. (19 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn’s work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Cadences which break (or mend) the heart — George Steiner on the mystery of musical meaning
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  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
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  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”
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  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
Tags:

Related reading and listening

  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 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)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Cadences which break (or mend) the heart — George Steiner on the mystery of musical meaning
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”
  • Art and whateverism — Jed Perl on why great art is triumphantly intolerant
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert

Links to posts and programs featuring D. C. Schindler:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Junius Johnson;

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Reinhard Huetter;

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P.:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Louis Markos:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring William C. Hackett:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Albert Howard:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Pfau:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Hans Boersma:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Hindmarsh:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Budziszewski:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve L. Porter:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Norman Wirzba:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Timothy Larsen:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Herman:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Rod Dreher:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Kevin J. Vanhoozer:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Esther Lightcap Meek:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Alan Jacobs:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Kimbell Kornu:

  • Term link format: Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Term link format: Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • Term link format: The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 minutes)
  • Term link format: 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)
  • Term link format: The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • Term link format: The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • Term link format: The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • Term link format: The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • Term link format: The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • Term link format: The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • Term link format: The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • Term link format: The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Term link format: Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • Term link format: St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Term link format: Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Term link format: Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Term link format: Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Term link format: Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Term link format: Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Term link format: Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Term link format: Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Term link format: Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Term link format: Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Term link format: Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • Term link format: How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Term link format: Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • Term link format: From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Term link format: Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Term link format: Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Term link format: Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 minutes)
  • Term link format: 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)
  • Term link format: Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring David Lyle Jeffrey:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring David Setran:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Peter Bouteneff:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Francis J. Beckwith:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Marianne Wright:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring David W. Fagerberg:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring William T. Cavanaugh:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Ward:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Dominic Taylor:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Robin Phillips:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan McIntosh:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Marian Schwartz:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Kaethler:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Donald B. Kraybill:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Storck:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan Chaplin:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring James W. Skillen:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Stivers:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Regnerus:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Emma Mason:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Noll:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring David Ney:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Greg Peters:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring David I. Smith:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Paone:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Kelly M. Kapic:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric O. Jacobsen:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jessica Hooten Wilson:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring James Turner:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Rubery:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Simon Oliver:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Blakely:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Kathryn Wehr:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Holly Ordway:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Tyson:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew D. Stewart:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring David Sehat:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring John Durham Peters:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Nigel Biggar:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Margaret Harper McCarthy:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Paul Davison:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Alison Milbank:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Brian R. Brock:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Newstok:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Fiona Hughes:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring R. Jared Staudt:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Grant R. Brodrecht:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Antonio López:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Brent Hull:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew B. Crawford:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Kerry McCarthy:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Robert P. George:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Christine Rosen:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Cairns:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Diana Pavlac Glyer:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring O. Carter Snead:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven D. Smith:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeremy Beer:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring James K. A. Smith:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Weikart:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Evan Bonds:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Perry L. Glanzer:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Dana Gioia:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas E. Bergler:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Srigley:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring J.A.C. Redford:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Carl Elliott:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Victor Lee Austin:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Sørina Higgins:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve Wilkens:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Gilbert Meilaender:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Martin X. Moleski:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Brendan Sweetman:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Allan C. Carlson:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason M. Baxter:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Barrett Fisher II:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Weston:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven Knepper:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan M. Felch:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Fred Turner:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Dickerson:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Jack R. Baker:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring W. Bradford Wilcox:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Bill Vitek:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Ted Prescott:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Dale Ahlquist:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Alexander Lingas:

Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes) Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes) The powerful presence of the body —
FROM VOL. 9
Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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) The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes) The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes) The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes) The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes) The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes) The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes) The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
FROM VOL. 88
Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes) The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes) Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes) St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes) Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes) Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes) Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes) Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes) Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes) Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes) Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes) Maximalist music —
FROM VOL. 8
Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes) Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
FROM VOL. 7
Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes) How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes) Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world. From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes) Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes) Depicting the human form —
FROM VOL. 6
Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
  • The powerful presence of the body —
    FROM VOL. 9
    Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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)
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
  • The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
  • The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
  • The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
  • The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
  • The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
    FROM VOL. 88
    Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
  • The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
  • Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
  • St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
  • Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes)
  • Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
  • Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
  • Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
  • Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
  • Maximalist music —
    FROM VOL. 8
    Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
  • Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)
  • Camille Paglia: Only religion can save the arts — Camille Paglia: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.”
  • Cadences which break (or mend) the heart — George Steiner on the mystery of musical meaning
  • Art and whateverism — Jed Perl on why great art is triumphantly intolerant

Links to posts and programs featuring David Cayley:

Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes) Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes) The powerful presence of the body —
FROM VOL. 9
Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 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) The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism" that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes) The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes) The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes) The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes) The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes) The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes) The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art —
FROM VOL. 88
Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes) The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes) Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes) St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn's work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes) Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes) Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes) Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel's Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel's time. (19 minutes) Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes) Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes) Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes) Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes) Maximalist music —
FROM VOL. 8
Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes) Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 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 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 51 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, David Blankenhorn, Robert Wuthnow, Mortimer Adler, Roger Lundin, Dana Gioia, Mary Midgely, and Ted Libbey Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
FROM VOL. 7
Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes) How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes) Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world. From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes) Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes) Depicting the human form —
FROM VOL. 6
Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 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)