PREVIEW
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Guests heard on Volume 102
Daniel M. Bell, Jr., author of Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State, on recovering the view that the just war tradition is more about the shaping of character and virtue than a checklist for political leaders
Lew Daly, author of God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, on how the discussion concerning faith-based initiatives raised larger issues about the identity of social groups in American society
Adam K. Webb, author of A Path of Our Own: An Andean Village and Tomorrow’s Economy of Values, on whether the traditional personal and communal virtues in premodern village life must be abandoned for poverty to be alleviated
Stratford Caldecott, author of Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, on how denying the reality of beauty is linked to a denial of the coherent meaning of Creation
James Matthew Wilson, author of The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition, on Jacques Maritain’s pilgrimage to faith and his subsequent development of a rich philosophy of beauty
Thomas Hibbs, author of Rouault-Fujimura: Soliloquies, on the similar projects of painters Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Makoto Fujimura (b. 1960), and how they each resisted various confusions in modern art
Related reading and listening
- Why the sexual revolution “failed on its own terms” — FROM VOL. 38 Wendy Shalit argues that when promiscuity is considered natural, women lose the leverage and power inherent in modesty. (13 minutes)
- Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters — FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
- 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)
- Apprehending the enduring things — Vigen Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. (53 minutes)
- Torrential winds of doctrine — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the “dictatorship of relativism”
- Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
- Festivity and the goodness of Creation — Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)
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- What higher education forgot — FROM VOL. 84 Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
- The formation of affections — FROM VOL. 101 James K. A. Smith explains how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy. (15 minutes)
- A Christian philosophy of integrated education — FROM VOL. 61 Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
- Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
- The social irrelevance of secular higher education — FROM VOL. 85 Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
- The history of Christianity and higher education — FROM VOL. 50 In tracing Christianity’s relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God’s ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
- Getting outside of our heads — FROM VOL. 128Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford explores what forms the self, arguing that individuality is an earned competence achieved through habits of submission to various tasks, traditions, and authorities. (20 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)
- In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)
- No neutral view of the cosmos — Ken Myers argues that Christians need to recover a “whole-earth discipleship” that enables them to think Christianly about all areas of life, including public life. (50 minutes)
- The artist’s commitment to truth — Fr. Damian Ference, author of Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy. (18 minutes)
- Flannery O’Connor and Thomistic philosophy — Fr. Damian Ference explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy, as evidenced by her reading habits, letters, prayer journal, and, of course, essays and fiction. (48 minutes)
- Creation’s goodness and human faithfulness — J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens on Wendell Berry’s understanding of how Creation is a gift with certain givenness
- Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
- A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
- Honoring the pigness of pigs — FROM VOL. 137 Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
- Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
- Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
- An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
- What does it mean to be a creature? — Canon-theologian Simon Oliver explains how and why the doctrine of Creation is cardinal and must frame all theology. (62 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)
- On wonder, wisdom, worship, and work — Classical educator Ravi Jain dives deeply into the nature, purpose, and interconnectedness of the liberal, common, and fine arts. (43 minutes)
- “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
- The unintended consequences of the Reformation — FROM VOL. 114 Historian Brad Gregory discusses the unintended consequences of the Reformation, consequences which continue to trouble us. (26 minutes)
- The early Church on asceticism and almsgiving — FROM VOL. 118Historian Peter Brown explains that in spite of having had access for centuries to the Church fathers’ numerous writings, only recently have we come to understand the social and material context within which they lived. (18 minutes)
- Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
- Nihilism in popular culture — FROM VOL. 44Thomas Hibbs, author of Shows about Nothing, discusses the nihilism that runs through films and television shows in recent American popular culture. (9 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)
- Creation as beauty and gift — FROM VOL. 67 David Bentley Hart describes how the Christian understanding of Creation as beauty and gift, as the outward expression of the delight the Trinity has in itself, reveals a vision of reality different from the pagan or fatalist vision of reality. (12 minutes)
- The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
- Milton Friedman meets Augustine — We present an interview from our archives with theologian William Cavanaugh, in which he examines the free market, consumerism, globalization, and scarcity, all parsed within an unabashedly theological framework. (37 minutes)
- Discerning an alternative modernity — In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)
- Lessons from Leviticus — The book of Leviticus may be assumed to be irrelevant for charting a way through the challenges of modernity. Theologian Peter J. Leithart disagrees. (22 minutes)
- The infinity of beauty in Bach — David Bentley Hart on why Johann Sebastian Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians
- A theology of active beauty — In a 2010 lecture, George Marsden examines a few ways in which the distorting effects of Enlightenment rationalism were resisted in the work of Jonathan Edwards. (64 minutes)
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- Medical tools and the shaping of identity — C. Ben Mitchell and Carl Elliott examine how we form judgments about bioethical questions, and how various medical capabilities form us. (27 minutes)
- Let saints on Earth in concert sing . . . — In this audio reprint of an article from First Things, Church historian Robert Wilken describes how the lives of virtuous Christians became models for imitation.(46 minutes)
- Webb, Adam K. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Adam K. Webb is Resident Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre, an overseas campus of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
- Christian education and pagan literature — Kyle Hughes on learning from Basil of Caesarea about the curricular choices for Christian educators
- Distributist & sustainable economics — Two interview from 2010: John C. Médaille summarizes how distributist economics differs from both capitalism and socialism. Then Herman Daly discusses the danger of economic theory abstracted from the actual stuff of Creation. (44 minutes)