The Life was the Light of men

Related reading and listening

1. Seven Messianic titles, seven attributes of Christ — Ken Myers introduces listeners to four composers who each have set all seven of the O Antiphons to music. (17 minutes)
2. 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)
3. 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)
4. Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
5. The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
6. 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)
7. Goodness, truth, and conscience — David Crawford examines Karol Wojtyła’s thought on the relationship between conscience and truth. (37 minutes)
8. 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)
9. 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)
10. 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)
11. 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)
12. 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)
13. Worldliness vs. otherworldliness — FROM VOL. 38 Sociologist Craig Gay speaks of the charge that Christianity is an otherworldly religion. (12 minutes)
14. How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
15. William Cowper: Reconciling the Heart with the Head — Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)
16. Approaches to knowing — FROM VOL. 104 Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge. (21 minutes)
17. Recovering the primacy of contemplation — Augusto Del Noce finds in St. Augustine resources to diagnose the fatal flaw in progressivism
18. Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
19. 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)
20. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
21. The Gospel as the foundation of dialogue — FROM VOL. 83 Professor Paul Weston discusses theologian Lesslie Newbigin’s time in India and how it influenced his thought and work. (17 minutes)
22. 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)
23. 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)
24. 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)
25. When is a market “free”? — William T. Cavanaugh argues for a richer conception of freedom than the reductionist one promoted by economist Milton Friedman. (44 minutes)
26. 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
27. 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)
28. A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
29. 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)
30. The danger of not defining “freedom” — Richard Bauckham insists that an adequate understanding of freedom requires recognition of God as the ground of true human freedom
31. An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
32. 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)
33. 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)
34. 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)
35. Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
36. Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
37. “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
38. Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
39. 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)
40. “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)
41. 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)
42. Creation as beauty and gift — FROM VOL. 67 David Bentley Hart describes how the Christian understanding of Creation as beauty and gift, as the outward expression of the delight the Trinity has in itself, reveals a vision of reality different from the pagan or fatalist vision of reality. (12 minutes)
43. 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)
44. 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)
45. 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)
46. 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)
47. The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
48. 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)
49. 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)
50. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison