released 8/5/2024
Why is Western culture welcoming a right to die, and how do we get beyond the fundamental nihilism of modernity? In a November 2022 lecture at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. Technological rationality, Bayer says, denies the reality of good and evil; it is directed toward control, not thought. But it is not the final account of what we are as human beings, and it cannot satisfy the human soul.
This lecture is provided courtesy of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family.
33 minutes
PREVIEW
The audio player for this program is restricted to MHA members and friends of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. Log in or sign up now to listen to it.
Related reading and listening
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 163 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley
- The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
- 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)
- Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
- Technology and the kingdom of God —
FROM VOL. 63 Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes) - 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)
- 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)
- Courtesy as a theological issue —
FROM VOL. 37 Donald McCullough discusses his insights into the increasingly coarse nature of society and the theological foundations for courtesy. (12 minutes) - Constructing your Favorites List — Ken Myers describes the new ecosystem of Mars Hill Audio’s membership/partnership program and shares clips from five recent lectures released as Bonus Features. (26 minutes)
- The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
- Science’s need for philosophy and revelation — D. Stephen Long explores a consistent theme in the work of theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar: the relationship between Christianity, modernity, and secularity. (46 minutes)
- Is American culture now story-less? — From our archives, Michael Kammen compares popular and mass culture, and Philip Fisher analyzes the idea that new cultural forms inevitably dissolve old ones. (26 minutes)
- Augusto Del Noce’s critique of modernity —
FROM VOL. 128 Physicist and mathematician Carlo Lancellotti discusses the life and work of twentieth-century Italian philosopher, Augusto Del Noce. (25 minutes) - 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)
- Faith as the pathway to knowledge — Lesslie Newbigin on authority and the Author of all being
- The integration of theoretical and mythic intelligence —
FROM VOL. 156 William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes) - Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
- Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
- Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
- The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
FROM VOL. 127 Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes) - Cleansing sea breezes — Thomas C. Oden argues that rather than being conformed to contemporary ideological trends, we should be informed by 2000 years of the Church’s wisdom. And Darrell Amundsen corrects some false claims about the early Church’s views on suicide. (27 minutes)
- Divorcing the spirit of the age — Thomas C. Oden on overcoming the theological faddism of the late twentieth century
- 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)
- “How deep the problems go” —
FROM VOL. 103 Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes) - Nihilism in popular culture —
FROM VOL. 44 Thomas Hibbs, author of Shows about Nothing, discusses the nihilism that runs through films and television shows in recent American popular culture. (9 minutes) - The sacramental vision of G. K. Chesterton —
FROM VOL. 112 Ralph C. Wood describes G. K. Chesterton’s imagination as especially fruitful in conveying grace and edification to his readers. (19 minutes) - 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)
- Living into focus — As our lives are increasingly shaped by technologically defined ways of living, Arthur Boers discusses how we might choose focal practices that counter distraction and isolation. (32 minutes)
- 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)
- Resituating discussion of “science” and “religion” — Peter Harrison argues that modern Western culture’s partitioning of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ into distinct spheres is a novel categorical conception in history. (58 minutes)
- Sources of wisdom (and of doubt) — Roger Lundin shares what he has appreciated about Mars Hill Audio conversations, and he discusses what makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers. (32 minutes)
- On moral authority and medicine — Continuing our time travel back to 1992, we hear two more interviews from the pilot tape for the Mars Hill Tapes, with sociologist James Davison Hunter and bioethicist Nigel Cameron. (28 minutes)
- Art as aestheticism, love as eroticism, politics as totalitarianism — Augusto Del Noce on the “technological mindset” and the loss of the sense of transcendence
- Aspects of our un-Christening — In this Friday Feature — presented courtesy of Biola University — Carlo Lancellotti talks with Aaron Kheriaty about the central ideas in Augusto Del Noce’s writings. (43 minutes)
- The consoling hum of technological society — Jacques Ellul on the danger of confusing “technology” with “machines”
- What happens when the Machine stops? — David E. Nye provides a context for evaluating the prospect of life in the Metaverse
- Technological choices become culture — David E. Nye insists that societies do have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established both politically and economically, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
- How should we then die? — Stanley Hauerwas asks how the fear of death shapes the practice of medicine
- The loss of awe, the idolatry of partial thinking — Thaddeus J. Kozinski on reading modernity’s symptoms wisely (and wonder-fully)
- The paradoxes of therapeutic culture — Stephen Gardner and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn discuss Philip Reiff’s diagnosis of how psychology replaced the social roles of religion, morality, and custom, redefining the meaning of what is public. (39 minutes)
- Confronting modernity through farming — Jesse Straight, who nurtures the life of Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia, talks about how he decided to pursue a vocation as a farmer in an effort to discover a way of life that worked against the characteristic fragmentation so dispiriting in modern culture. (24 minutes)
- “Death lies at the heart of modern medicine” — Dr. Kimbell Kornu, who teaches health care ethics and palliative medicine at St. Louis University, talks about why modern medicine can’t adequately explain health or suffering, even as doctors promote health and try to eliminate suffering. (28 minutes)
- Medicine and the narrative of progress — Jeffrey Bishop explains how modern Western medicine is intertwined with politics and technology within a vision of progress that has an eschatological quality to it. (25 minutes)
- Loving your neighbor during a pandemic — Brad Littlejohn reflects on how best to ask and answer some of the questions raised by our current disease-ravaged circumstances, particularly questions related to Christian freedom and love of neighbor. (29 minutes)
- Is there a transcendent order of which we are a part? — Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the spirit of the (hyper) modern world is one of relentless disposability and of denial of a transcendent order to the cosmos. (36 minutes)
- Deconstructing the Enlightenment — Peter Leithart discusses Johann Georg Hamann’s insights about the nature of language and his prophetic critique of the Enlightenment. (17 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)
- James Matthew Wilson: “T. S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy” — James Matthew Wilson examines T. S. Eliot’s cultural conservatism and religious conversion in light of his intellectual and familial influences. (79 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 143 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Regnerus, Jessica Hooten Wilson, John Henry Crosby, John F. Crosby, Wynand De Beer, and Sørina Higgins
- Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians — Alison Milbank discusses how both Chesterton and Tolkien restore reason to fantasy and help us to see things as we were meant to see them. (20 minutes)