Creation as beauty and gift

Related reading and listening

1. A prophetic “wake-up call” — In this 2024 lecture honoring the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth, Malcolm Guite explores MacDonald’s power to awaken readers’ spirits and effect in them a change of consciousness. (59 minutes)
2. 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)
3. Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
4. The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
5. The gift of meaningful work — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler argues that genuine work is inherently meaningful and facilitates an encounter with reality and therefore, ultimately, with God. (36 minutes)
6. 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)
7. Goodness, truth, and conscience — David Crawford examines Karol Wojtyła’s thought on the relationship between conscience and truth. (37 minutes)
8. The relationship between prudence and reality  — In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how the virtue of prudence is fundamentally connected with a deep and anchored understanding of reality. (54 minutes)
9. A metaphysics of realism, relationality, and personalism — John Milbank gives a survey and critique of the efforts of 20th and 21st century theologians to articulate a Trinitarian ontology that reflects reality and counters secularization. (61 minutes)
10. Worldliness vs. otherworldliness — FROM VOL. 38 Sociologist Craig Gay speaks of the charge that Christianity is an otherworldly religion. (12 minutes)
11. 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)
12. 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)
13. 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)
14. Christopher Hitchens vs. G. K. Chesterton — Ralph Wood compares Christopher Hitchens‘s view of the cosmos with that of G. K. Chesterton, arguing that Chesterton succeeded where Hitchens failed. (44 minutes)
15. 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)
16. 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
17. 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)
18. A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
19. 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)
20. An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
21. The gift of objective reality — Moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan makes an argument for the consistency of the idea of law when it is conceived in a theological context. (40 minutes)
22. 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)
23. “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
24. Experiencing literature in its wholeness — FROM VOL. 50Glenn Arbery uses the analogies of sports fandom and ritual to explain how a “long habituation” in learning about form in literature enables one to enter into a greater depth of experience of reality through literature. (26 minutes)
25. Faith and unbelief — FROM VOL. 98 This Archive Feature revisits two conversations, one with Roger Lundin and one with David Bentley Hart, on what makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers. (39 minutes)
26. “How deep the problems go” — FROM VOL. 103Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)
27. 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)
28. Mechanism and the abolition of meaning — On the occasion of philosopher Daniel Dennett’s death this week, Ken Myers presents an archive interview with David Bentley Hart in which he explains how pure naturalism leads to the un-doing of rationality. (37 minutes)
29. Materialism and the problem of mind — David Bentley Hart on the evasiveness implicit on all efforts to explain away human consciousness
30. Dreary atheist fundamentalism — David Bentley Hart defends the naturalness of religious belief against the assertions of the Naturalists
31. 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)
32. The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
33. Genealogy of a work of praise — For Good Friday, Ken Myers tells the history of the text and music behind the popular hymn, “O Sacred Head, now wounded.” (27 minutes)
34. 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)
35. 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)
36. Bach retrospective — In light of Passiontide and Holy Week, Ken Myers revisits three interviews — with Calvin Stapert, Robin Leaver, and Christoph Wolff — that provide an illustrative background for listeners to appreciate J. S. Bach’s theological attentiveness and scholarly genius. (36 minutes)
37. Music that demands an existential commitment — Jaroslav Pelikan on the radical differences between Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Passions
38. The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
39. The infinity of beauty in Bach — David Bentley Hart on why Johann Sebastian Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians
40. 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)
41. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
42. Rejecting “two-tiered” Thomism — FROM VOL. 155 David Bentley Hart on how “two-tier Thomism” deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. (42 minutes)
43. Christology and human relationality — Joseph Ratzinger on how the longing for eternity expressed in human love is an analogue of Trinitarian love
44. Earthly things in relation to heavenly realities — In this lecture, Ken Myers argues that the end of education is to train students to recognize what is really real. The things of this earth are only intelligible in light of heavenly realities. (59 minutes)
45. The Symbol of Authority — In the second of two lectures given by D. C. Schindler, he explores the nature of authority with reference to the transcendental dance of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. (60 minutes)
46. Understanding the doctrine of participation — FROM VOL. 150Theologian and priest Andrew Davison believes that retrieving the historic doctrine of participation is vital to help Christians escape from the default philosophy of the age. (32 minutes)
47. On Earth as it is in Heaven — FROM VOL. 108Hans Boersma — author of Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry — explains why Christians should reject the modern separation of Heaven and Earth and recover a “sacramental ontology.” (26 minutes)
48. Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
49. Lilies as analogues for farming — Fred Bahnson on the wisdom of attending to patterns of Creation
50. Making peace with the land — Fred Bahnson challenges us to consider how we might honor our created and redeemed relationship with the earth as God’s stewards. (48 minutes)