Personhood, limits, and academic vocation

Related reading and listening

1. 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)
2. 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)
3. 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)
4. “Gender” as ultimate separation — In this November 2018 lecture, Margaret McCarthy explains how the predictions of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae regarding the consequences of separating sex from procreation have proven true. (38 minutes)
5. How words are central to the human experience — FROM VOL. 95 Craig Gay reflects on the essential linguistic nature of humanity: how our growth (or decline) in life is tied to words. (18 minutes)
6. Bearing well the burdens of the past, present, and future — Louis Markos shows how great literature like the Iliad links us to the human story and strengthens us to live fully and well. (65 minutes)
7. 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)
8. 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)
9. The roots of American disorder — In this reading of an article from 2021 by Michael Hanby, the critique of Marxism in Augusto del Noce’s work is compared with texts from the American Founders. (79 minutes)
10. 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)
11. 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)
12. 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)
13. 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)
14. 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)
15. Automation and human agency — FROM VOL. 150 Philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford laments the losses of human skill that correspond with gains in mechanical automation. (21 minutes)
16. 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)
17. Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
18. 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)
19. Not good to be alone — In a lecture titled “Gender and the Common Good,” Margaret Harper McCarthy argues that the current ideology regarding gender fundamentally separates people from one another and finally even from themselves. (34 minutes)
20. 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)
21. The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
22. The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
23. Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
24. The academy’s deconstruction of both person and community — Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”
25. From university to multiversity to demoversity — Alvin Kernan on tectonic shifts in higher education since the 1960s
26. Scholarship’s silos and the eclipse of meaning — Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality
27. An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
28. Christian scholars and the secularized academy — Mark Noll on why Christian intellectual vitality requires a vision for the universality of Christian truth
29. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
30. The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for “re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
31. The Christian humanism of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — One of the main themes emphasized by these three guests is that Solzhenitsyn was not principally concerned with politics, but with human nature and purpose, understood in light of the Christian account of reality. (39 minutes)
32. Human dignity, cosmic hierarchies — Political scientist Robert Kraynak on how Christianity opposes worldly hierarchies with hierarchies of its own
33. Challenging the “gospel of democracy” — Robert Kraynak argues that assumptions many modern Christians hold about liberal democracy are rooted in some false ideas about the nature and purpose of civil government. (46 minutes)
34. Recovering natural philosophy — Science teacher Ravi Scott Jain discusses natural philosophy, the “love of wisdom in the realm of nature,” as the overarching discipline in the sciences. (21 minutes)
35. Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
36. God is not Zeus; you are not Prometheus — Ron Highfield addresses those who doubt Christianity’s goodness, especially as regards modern assumptions about identity, freedom, and dignity. (24 minutes)
37. With Eastern eyes — Paul Valliere and Vigen Guroian discuss questions of law, politics, and human nature from the Orthodox tradition. (34 minutes)
38. Liberal arts and the importance of truth — Listen to conversations with two guests from Volume 153, Margarita Mooney and Louis Markos, on the liberal arts and the importance of truth. (26 minutes
39. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
40. We are not Cybermen — Essayist L. M. Sacasas discusses some of the ideas of Ivan Illich, whose work has influenced Sacasas’s own understanding of the anti-human dynamics of technological society. (21 minutes)
41. Thinking Christianly about the body — Theologian and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender discusses some of the themes he explores in two of his books: Body, Soul and Bioethics; and Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. (19 minutes)
42. On the re-enchantment of education — Stratford Caldecott on teaching in light of cosmic harmony
43. “A roaming unrest of the spirit” — Theologian Reinhard Hütter argues that the contemporary plague of pornography is a symptom of a deep spiritual apathy. (28 minutes)
44. What is at stake for us in a self-driving future? — Matthew Crawford vividly details the “personal knowledge” acquired in interaction with physical things, their mecho-systems, and the people who care for them. (16 minutes)
45. Justice and gender, round 2 — Margaret Harper McCarthy, one of the authors of a brief on gender submitted to the Supreme Court, discusses the philosophical and practical implications of fashionable notions of the meaning of gender. (33 minutes)
46. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 147 — FEATURED GUESTS: R. Jared Staudt, Jason Peters, D. C. Schindler, Craig Gay, Mary Hirschfeld, and Patrick Samway
47. The Liberal Arts tradition, II — context and extension — Kevin Clark explains how the book he co-authored defines a framework in which the Trivium and the Quadrivium are the core of a curriculum that includes piety, gymnastics, music, philosophy, and theology. (20 minutes)
48. The Liberal Arts tradition, I — science and harmony — Ravi Scott Jain discusses the place of the Quadrivium — the four mathematical arts — within the larger framework of the classical approach to education. (21 minutes)
49. On the meaning of gender and the truth of human nature — Margaret Harper McCarthy, one of the authors of a brief on gender submitted to the Supreme Court, discusses the philosophical and practical implications of fashionable notions of the meaning of gender. (29 minutes)
50. Fischer, Hart, and Highfield on freedom — Three past guests on the Journal explore the meaning of freedom and some common modern misunderstandings of the concept — errors with real consequences. (22 minutes)