released 11/1/2018
For the Fall 2018 Areopagus Lecture, philosopher Paul Tyson, in his talk entitled “Escaping the Silver Chair: Renewed Minds and Our Vision of Reality,” explored how the Christian responsibility “to repent” involves more than expressing feelings of regret for moral wrong-doing and the desire to reform. Rather, the New Testament call to “repentance,” the English rendition of the Greek word metanoia, is inseparable from radically reenvisioning what is “really real.” St. Paul’s admonition that we be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” — in other words, metanoia — invokes a process that demands the recognition and rejection of various false enchantments of this world. With the help of C. S. Lewis’s story The Silver Chair, however, we realize that identifying and then escaping the ways in which we are bewitched is no easy task.
68 Minutes
PREVIEW
The player for the full version of this Lecture is only available to current members or listeners with a legacy account. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.
Related reading and listening
- “Prophet of holiness” — Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
- Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia — Alex Markos explores the transformational power of Aslan as the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (31 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
- Early evangelical response to C. S. Lewis — Historian Mark Noll discusses the reasons why American evangelicals were initially slow to warm to Lewis. (15 minutes)
- “A state of divine carelessness” —
FROM VOL. 121 Daniel Gabelman attempts to correct the notion that George MacDonald prizes seriousness and sobriety. (20 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)
- On The Abolition of Man —
FROM VOL. 154 Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes) - Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book — Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control
- Education, reason, and the Good — Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson on C. S. Lewis’s argument about natural law
- 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)
- Tyson, Paul — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dr Paul Tyson is a Senior Honorary Fellow with the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is an applied philosophical theologian.
- Scholarship’s silos and the eclipse of meaning — Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
- An unlikely trio in life (and in death) —
FROM VOL. 1 Philosopher Peter Kreeft was interviewed in 1982 by Ken Myers about his book, Between Heaven and Hell. In 1992, that interview was featured on the pilot cassette tape which became the Mars Hill Tapes. (10 minutes) - Deconstructing the myths of modernity — In order to counter modernity’s fragmentation, Paul Tyson argues that we must recover a foundation of reality based on meaning and being. (35 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 156 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kimbell Kornu, Paul Tyson, Mark Noll, David Ney, William C. Hackett, and Marian Schwartz
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 155 — FEATURED GUESTS: Donald Kraybill, Thaddeus Kozinski, David Bentley Hart, Nigel Biggar, Ravi Scott Jain, and Jason Baxter
- The Narnian as Jeremiah — Michael Ward on the bleak prognosis in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
- MYST and mythic guests — Game designers Rand and Robyn Miller explain how their game’s creation was influenced by their love for the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. (13 minutes)
- Sneaking past watchful dragons — Junius Johnson describes how Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of Creation resonates with that of C. S. Lewis and Bonaventure, all three of whom served as mentors in his thinking about beauty. (18 minutes)
- Renaissance music for Good Friday — In a special Feature for Good Friday, Ken Myers shares settings of passages from the Book of Lamentations and of the Tenebrae Responsories by Tomás Luis de Victoria. (18 minutes)
- Meditative music for Passiontide — At the start of Passiontide, Ken Myers introduces listeners to works by the Renaissance composer Orlande de Lassus which highlight the theme of lamentation. (18 minutes)
- Becoming a serious and receptive reader — David Lyle Jeffrey offers a thoughtful reading of C. S. Lewis’s account of thoughtful reading
- Walter Hooper, R.I.P., and Christina Rossetti’s Advent poems — Walter Hooper (1931-2020) describes his first meeting with C. S. Lewis, a man he so admired and long served. In a second chapter in today’s Feature, Emma Mason explains how Christina Rossetti’s hopeful eschatological beliefs influenced the poems she wrote about the season of Advent. (21 minutes)
- Erotic love (allegedly) conquers all — C. S. Lewis on why the “right to sexual happiness” makes totalitarian demands
- The correspondence between Lewis and Sayers — Gina Dalfonzo chronicles the encouragement and occasional spats documented in letters between C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, two very different but nonetheless mutually sympathetic Christians. (24 minutes)
- Thomas Howard, R.I.P. — Thomas Howard encouraged in many students and readers an imaginative appropriation of faith and truth. This interview — released at the time of his death in 2020 — includes his discussion of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. (55 minutes)
- The sins of the fathers . . . and ours — Eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis warned against surrogate contrition
- Spirits in Bondage: Lewis’s early poetry — Karen Swallow Prior and Don W. King discuss C. S. Lewis’s early poetry and the evidence therein of a “frustrated dualism.” (23 minutes)
- The reality that science cannot see — Philosopher Paul Tyson illustrates features of daily life that science cannot “see,” such as love, friendship, justice, and hope, and argues that such things are nonetheless real. (20 minutes)
- Three books by Peter Kreeft — In excerpts from three interviews, Peter Kreeft discusses our “brave new world”; the importance of integrity in “creed, code, and cult”; and the reality of transcendence in our human story. (36 minutes)
- Thomas Howard: “The ‘Moral Mythology’ of C. S. Lewis” — Thomas Howard describes C. S. Lewis’s fictional works in terms of a mythological re-presentation of the Christian and pre-modern moral and cosmic vision. (41 minutes)
- Alison Milbank: Imaginative Apologetics beyond C. S. Lewis — Alison Milbank offers an approach to defending the Christian faith that restores the imagination as a faculty inseparable from reason. (61 minutes)
- The genius, rhetoric, and humanity of C. S. Lewis — James Como and Walter Hooper examine the greatness of C. S. Lewis — his multifaceted genius as well as his humanity and humor. (21 minutes)
- Further up and further in: understanding Narnia — Joseph Pearce explains how fairy stories can open our eyes to the depths of reality if we read them with the virtue of humility. (15 minutes)
- C. S. Lewis on communities of thought — Alan Jacobs talks about C. S. Lewis’s two essays, “The Inner Ring” and “Membership” and how they explore the fact that all of our thinking is situated within relationships. (19 minutes)
- The essential meaning at the heart of reality — Paul Tyson discusses how the modern preoccupation with doing has distracted us from the meaning of being. To meet the cultural challenges of our moment believers must recovery the ontological richness of the premodern Christian heritage. (21 minutes)
- The mythic song of modernity — In his book Returning to Reality, philosopher Paul Tyson imagines a grand “Song of Modernity.” In it, he captures the triumphant sense of enlightenment characteristic of modern thought. Ken Myers summarizes some of the key themes in Tyson’s book. (17 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 139 — FEATURED GUESTS: W. Bradford Littlejohn, Simon Oliver, Matthew Levering, Esther Lightcap Meek, Paul Tyson, and David Fagerberg
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 134 — FEATURED GUESTS: Chris Armstrong, Grevel Lindop, Michael Martin, William T. Cavanaugh, Philip Turner, and Gisela Kreglinger
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 133 — FEATURED GUESTS: Darío Fernández-Morera, Francis Oakley, Oliver O’Donovan, Thomas Storck, John Safranek, Brian Brock, and George Marsden
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
- Irrigating deserts — C. S. Lewis on why teachers must train the sentiments
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
- The Heav’ns and All the Powers Therein — Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in C. S. Lewis‘s seven books about Narnia. (68 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
- Alan Jacobs on The Narnian — Alan Jacobs discusses C. S. Lewis’s view of the imagination and his deep conviction that the shaping of the conscience requires the training of the imagination. (53 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 77 — FEATURED GUESTS: Eric Miller, Lisa de Boer, Peter J. Schakel, and Alan Jacobs