About Mars Hill Audio

The Mission

To produce creative audio resources that encourage Christians to grow in obedient wisdom concerning the cultural consequences of our duty to love God and neighbor.

What does Mars Hill Audio do?

Mars Hill Audio produces and curates audio resources (interviews, lectures, and essay readings) that help listeners examine the distinctive features of the culture of modernity and how those features are in conflict with Christian faithfulness. Our editorial selections cover a large spectrum of topics, including theology and philosophy, law, education, sociology, media ecology, literature, and the fine arts.

Why Mars Hill Audio?

For most Western thinkers prior to the modern period, the order of the cosmos was the standard for guiding the order of the soul and the order of society. In other words, as theologian Colin Gunton says, “human life is good life when it conforms itself to the way things truly are, when it takes shape in the world as it truly is.” This cultivation of a given nature was understood as “culture.” Healthy cultural forms were faithful to creation, and unhealthy forms were the product of human desire suppressing or denying the created order. The shift in Western history from this view of culture to a view that culture is a human effort to impose meaning on a meaningless world is one of the most profound developments in world history.

Mars Hill Audio seeks to thoughtfully discuss cultural choices more in keeping with the ends of human flourishing. Guests on MHA examine the ideas, institutions, preoccupations, and fashionable assumptions that shape our cultural lives. We are committed to pursuing what it means to be created as cultural beings, exploring the complex ways in which cultures shape how we interpret, imagine, and experience the world.

Tell me more about the history and context of Mars Hill Audio

The phrase “faith seeking understanding” has long been used to describe the work of theology. Behind the project of Mars Hill Audio is the conviction that full-time theologians aren’t the only Christians who need to seek understanding. All believers are called to be faithful, which in a Biblical framework means much more than sheer commitment. Especially in times of cultural confusion and fragmentation, Christian faithfulness demands wisdom and discernment.

Near the end of his magisterial study of political theology, The Desire of the Nations, moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan observes that “those who do not make an effort to read their times in a disciplined way read them all the same, but with narrow and parochial prejudice.” The discipline O’Donovan prescribes is necessary in part because cultural trends are often expressions of long-developing patterns of thought and practice. Disputes about marriage laws or public bathroom assignments don’t arise out of thin air; they have a genealogy, a back-story, an evolutionary trajectory in light of which apparently arbitrary and absurd crusades make a kind of sense.

The logic of contemporary social and political arguments cannot be understood apart from the centuries-long story of modernity. And that story (like all human stories) cannot be understood without reference to dubious theological commitments. Along with many others, theologian David L. Schindler insists that the crisis of modernity is a result of its “driving impulse to order the world without God.” Long before atheism became plausible or fashionable, influential early modern thinkers (many of them professing Christians) believed that social and political life could be ordered as if the triune God didn’t exist. Believers and unbelievers could thrive in a system “which pushes God to the margins or private gaps of culture.”

The dehumanizing practical atheism of modernity seems to be on its last legs. It has been a social experiment that is already discredited, though few are willing to say so in public. As its edifices collapse, the rebuilding that must follow will be the work of generations.

Sadly, a majority of American believers still intuitively embrace a faith that is essentially private, and so their hope cannot take cultural form. One of the main goals of the interviews and commentary offered by Mars Hill Audio is to provide Christian imaginations with confidence in the cosmic dimensions of Christ’s lordship. In offering a disciplined way of reading the signs of the times, we hope to provide a rich theological framework for understanding how cultural life could take forms that honor and reflect the form of Christ’s love. Many of our listeners report that Mars Hill Audio has helped them significantly as their own faith has sought understanding.

Since 1993, Mars Hill Audio has been encouraging conversations about faith, faithfulness, and culture. Our conversation partners are primarily the authors of especially insightful books. Some authors describe in some detail aspects of the history of modern culture. Others explore theological themes and their cultural consequences. And some writers examine how cultural practices and artifacts convey beliefs and dispositions.

Our other essential partners are a diverse band of thousands of thoughtful and attentive listeners, women and men eager to understand more fully the spirit of the age and how it might be resisted. You may read some of their assessments of our work here.

To learn more about the editorial concerns of our work, you may download copies of letters from Ken Myers sent recently to our listeners.

For more about our understanding of what we have in mind when we use the word “culture,” see this page.

Resources