An Intercollegiate Studies Institute Partner Feature
released 5/10/2024
In the first chapter of The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis warned that education that refuses to inculcate virtue eliminates the very capacity that makes us human: the ordering of “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” In an article titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies.
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.
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)
“Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 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)
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)
Let saints on Earth in concert sing . . . — In this audio reprint of an article from First Things, Church historian Robert Wilken describes how the lives of virtuous Christians became models for imitation.(46 minutes)
Ward, Michael — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Michael Ward is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hillsdale College.
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
Education and human be-ing in the world — In championing a classical approach to teaching, Stratford Caldecott was an advocate for a musical education, affirming the harmonious unity in Creation. (26 minutes)
Maintaining a connected grasp of things — Ian Ker summarizes the central concern of John Henry Newman’s educational philosophy as developed in The Idea of a University
The future of Christian learning — Historian Mark Noll insists that for Christian intellectual life to flourish, a vision for comprehensive and universal social and cultural consequences of the Gospel has to be assumed. (18 minutes)
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)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS:
David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
Sustaining a heritage of wisdom — Louise Cowan (1916–2015) explains how the classics reach the deep core of our imagination and teach us to order our loves according to the wholeness of reality. (16 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)
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)
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
Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
Teachers and Learners — Ian Ker shares John Henry Newman’s ideals of learning, and Mark Schwehn discusses the virtues of good teachers. (27 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
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)
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)
Visionary education — Josef Pieper on the mistake of confusing education with mere training
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)
Healthy habits of mind — Scott Newstok describes how many efforts at educational reform have become obstacles to thinking well, and he offers a rich and evocative witness to a better way of understanding what thinking is. (20 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 151 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Richard Stivers, Holly Ordway, Robin Phillips, Scott Newstok, Junius Johnson, and Peter Mercer-Taylor
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)
Wise use of educational technologies — David I. Smith articulates the difficulties Christian schools face as they seek to use technology in a faithful way. (24 minutes)
Educational provocations — Steve Talbott on establishing ends for education before selecting means
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS:
David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
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)
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)
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)
How should we then teach? — Following three years of research, David I. Smith discusses what he and his colleagues learned about how educational technologies can be profitable servants and not tyrannical masters. (56 minutes)
