In launching our partnership program in 2024, we expanded how we pursue our mission by serving a curatorial and custodial role beyond the scope of the recordings that originate in our studio. We are pleased to offer the Features listed below, each of which has been provided by one of our Partners. These Features include lectures and texts read as “audio reprints.” Listeners may also sign up for free Partner-affiliated memberships to listen to all Features provided by particular Partners. Simply choose a Partner from the list of Partners on this page, and follow the sidebar instructions to sign up.
Ideas made incarnate
In this lecture, Karen Swallow Prior examines the power of great literature to shape lives, nourish imaginations, and develop a vision of the good life. (43 minutes)
Ethical issues in neurobiological interventions
William Hurlbut explores current neurobiological advancements and the ethics and dangers of biotechnology interventions that go beyond therapy. (62 minutes)
How social media truncates relationships
In this lecture, Felicia Wu Song explains how social media industrializes and monetizes our relationships, forming us in modes of relationships and identity that are detrimental to ourselves and to society. (41 minutes)
From culture war to culture care
In this 2016 lecture, artist Makoto Fujimura asks what would it look like for Christians to be stewards of beauty and human flourishing in all areas of life and culture. (48 minutes)
The personal element in all knowing
Mark Mitchell connects key aspects of Michael Polanyi’s conception of knowledge with Matthew Crawford’s insistence that real knowing involves more than technique. (34 minutes)
Etiquette and ethics
In this essay, Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners) argues that etiquette is “civilization’s first necessity” and an indispensable societal virtue. (21 minutes)
An embedded life
Following a move from one state to another, Gilbert Meilaender explores the tension between being simultaneously a sojourner and a body located in place and time. (30 minutes)
Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist
In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
Humans as biological hardware
In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
The fraught marriage of liberty and equality
In this essay, Patrick Deneen examines Alexis de Tocqueville’s complex and insightful portrait of “democratic man” living in the context of perpetual societal tension between the excesses of liberty and equality. (39 minutes)
“A sign of contradiction”
In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 minutes)
Education that counters alienation
In this lecture, Jeanne Schindler explores how digital technologies warp not only education but our experience of being human. (30 minutes)
Education vs. conditioning
Education necessarily involves metaphysical and theological preconditions, and Michael Hanby argues that our current education crisis is a result of society rejecting these preconditions. (41 minutes)
Knowing by heart
D. C. Schindler reflects on Plato’s idea of “conversion” in education, assuming the symbol of the heart as the center of man. (39 minutes)
Laity as the “muscle” behind world-building
Andrew Willard Jones calls for the renewal of a robust understanding of the role of the laity in actively shaping the world. (39 minutes)
Education as a pilgrimage and a mystery
In this lecture, James Matthew Wilson gives a compelling argument for understanding the role of a literary or poetic education as an immersion of the whole being in truth and beauty. (43 minutes)
Nature’s intelligibility
In this lecture, Christopher Blum argues that scientists need to regain a full appreciation of nature’s intelligibility, as they are apt to lose sight of reality due to the reductionism produced by their theories. (31 minutes)
Submission to mathematical truth
In this lecture, Carlo Lancellotti argues that integration of the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of mathematics is needed in a robust liberal arts mathematics curriculum. (25 minutes)
Music, silence, and the order of Creation
In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how it is that our participation in harmonic beauty in music is a kind of participation in the life of God, in Whom all order and beauty coheres and is sustained. (61 minutes)
The need for robust Christian intellectual life
In this lecture, Robert Benne surveys the contemporary landscape in which Christian scholars attempt to integrate their faith and their intellectual life. (43 minutes)
The gift of liturgical time
In this lecture, Gregory Wilbur explains how liturgy and liturgical time align us to the rhythms and order of Creation, forming us as disciples. (45 minutes)
Foolishness, gravity, and the Church
In this essay, Albert L. Shepherd V explains why George MacDonald’s story “The Light Princess” is meant for “all who are childlike in faith and imagination.” (8 minutes)
An “austerely chastened” pneumatology
In this lecture, Ephraim Radner critiques modern pneumatology for effectually denying the “difficult givenness” of this life and implicitly subverting our human creatureliness. (40 minutes)
How fantasy restores the world
In this 2019 lecture, Alison Milbank shows how fantasy can help restore to us a vision of human flourishing that counters the atomization and meaninglessness of modern life. (43 minutes)
