Friendship and life together

Related reading and listening

• Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 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 political wisdom of Edmund Burke — FROM VOL. 28 Daniel Ritchie discusses the enduring political wisdom of British statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke (1729–1797). (13 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)
• “A society of friends at work” — Political philosopher Andrew Willard Jones lays out a robust vision for a just society in which virtues are formed in an analogical manner through relational obedience and trust. (71 minutes)
• Is liberalism compatible with religious freedom? — D. C. Schindler relies on two Thomistic axioms to illustrate why liberalism — which claims to offer a minimalist conception of the common good — is ultimately incompatible with a Catholic understanding of religious freedom. (34 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• Prudence in politics — FROM VOL. 146 Henry T. Edmondson, III talks about Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of political life, which was influenced by a range of thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk. (19 minutes)
• 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)
• Renewal of authentic political authority — Brad Littlejohn builds a case for the idea that authority makes free action possible, illustrating how that occurs within the forms of political and epistemic authority, properly understood and wisely practiced. (45 minutes)
• A prophetic pilgrim — Historian Eric Miller charts Christopher Lasch’s intellectual journey in search of a vision that could direct Americans toward the higher hopes and nobler purposes that might lead to a flourishing common life. (57 minutes)
• Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• Pierced feet, wounded side, bloodied head — As Passiontide begins (the coming Sunday), Ken Myers introduces listeners to Membra Jesu Nostri, an hour-long cycle of seven cantatas written about 1680 by Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707). (16 minutes)
• Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
• 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”
• Political community and the good — D. C. Schindler on why political life is inevitably “a particular interpretation of the highest human good”
• In dulci jubilo — Ken Myers introduces some of the music for the season composed by Michael Praetorius (1571–1621), best known for his settings of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (“Lo how a rose e’er blooming”) and In dulci jubilo. (18 minutes)
• Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
• Why kings are compelling — Historian Francis Oakley describes how the modern idea of “secular” politics is a striking departure in human history. (32 minutes)
• Put not your trust in tyrants — Andrew Willard Jones contrasts the pre-modern understanding of political power with the modern view. (46 minutes)
• Justice and truth — Joseph Ratzinger: “Plato’s philosophy is utterly misconceived when he is presented as an individualistic, dualistic thinker who negates what is earthly and advocates a flight into the beyond.”
• 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)
• With virtue, harmony, & charity — Kevin Vost traces a Christian development of the meaning of friendship throughout history, particularly as it is understood through the incarnation of Christ. (18 minutes)
• Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
• Welcoming one another — Christine Pohl describes the practice of hospitality in Church history and the particular challenges to hospitality we face in our era. (30 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)
• The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
• The music and the notes are precious — Ken Myers encourages an understanding of the Church as a particular culture that should be nourished and sustained, and then describes the history of an Advent hymn written by St. Ambrose. (27 minutes)
• 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)
• Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
• Passions before Bach — In preparation for Holy Week, Ken Myers presents a whirlwind music history lesson with musical examples from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. (22 minutes)
• The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that captures some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (26 minutes)
• Convivial is beautiful — Ivan Illich on “the opposite of industrial productivity”
• Loving relationships in community — In conversation with moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan, and with readings from his book, Entering into Rest, Ken Myers explores a central theme in O’Donovan’s work: that we are created to enjoy loving relationships in community. (27 minutes)
• Marva Dawn on spiritual formation and being Church — This Feature presents an interview with Marva Dawn from Volume 38 of the Journal, during which she talks about concerns discussed in two of her books, related to the spiritual formation of children and a more holistic understanding of sex and intimacy. (23 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)
• Freed from the burden of choice — Writing in the mid-1990s, Alan Ehrenhalt reflects on the relationship between authority and community
• Why communities need authority — Alan Ehrenhalt argues that real community can only be sustained when three things are assumed: the goodness of limits, the necessity of authority, and the reality of personal sin. (13 minutes)
• 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)
• Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
• The social context of freedom — Brad Littlejohn talks about the necessity of a more expansive understanding of freedom, one which recognizes that we are really only free within the social experience of shared meaning and mutual recognition. (17 minutes)