How myth speaks to deep desires in the human heart

Related reading and listening

• Immersion in a different time — FROM VOL. 17 Literary critic Alan Jacobs considers the author Patrick O’Brian as perhaps the best historical novelist ever. (13 minutes)
• Apprehending the enduring things — Vigen Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. (53 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
• 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)
• “A state of divine carelessness” — FROM VOL. 121 Daniel Gabelman attempts to correct the notion that George MacDonald prizes seriousness and sobriety. (20 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)
• 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)
• In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
• Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
• A George MacDonald symposium — Excerpts from four interviews talking about the work of George MacDonald: Michael Di Fuccia, Marianne Wright, David Fagerberg, and Daniel Gabelman. (28 minutes)
• George MacDonald on the imagination — Readings from two essays by George MacDonald about how the human imagination is “made in the image” of God’s imagination. (20 minutes)
• A myth which is also a fact — Holly Ordway on the existentially resonant power of myth
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
• The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
• Mythopoeic power — Stratford Caldecott on Tolkien’s literary achievement
• From myth to sacramentality — Craig Bernthal: Tolkien asserts that reading fairy stories is a way to ‘recover’ the world”
• Echoes of Middle-earth — Holly Ordway describes the overwhelming influence that J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings has had on the development of the fantasy genre in the past 50 years. (12 minutes)
• Faith born of wonder — Theologian Andrew Davison echoes a theme in the work of G. K. Chesterton, describing the work of apologetics as awakening a sense of wonder in the reality of Creation as a beautiful gift. (23 minutes)
• On faithful fiction: Larry Woiwode, Alan Jacobs, & Jay Tolson — This Friday Feature represents three interviews on fiction from Volume 3: Larry Woiwode on what makes good fiction, Alan Jacobs on P. D. James’s The Children of Men, and Jay Tolson on Walker Percy. (29 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)
• Christina Rossetti and George MacDonald revisited — Alan Jacobs talks about the theme of renunciation in Christina Rossetti’s poems, and Stephen Prickett looks at aspects of nineteenth-century Romanticism from which George MacDonald’s work emerges. (33 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 148 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, Willem Vanderburg, Jeffrey Bilbro, Emma Mason, Alison Milbank, and Timothy Larsen
• Thomas Howard on Charles Williams — From a 1995 interview, literary scholar Thomas Howard describes the texture and depth of the “metaphysical thrillers” of Charles Williams. (16 minutes)
• Virtue and myth in Middle-earth — Ralph C. Wood and Bradley Birzer discuss Christian wisdom, virtues, and the strength of myth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s created world of Middle-earth. (33 minutes)
• Man, myth, and Middle-earth — Tom Shippey and Joseph Pearce discuss the “author of the century,” J. R. R. Tolkien, and assert the power of myth to convey deep truth. (26 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff
• On children’s literature and gardening — Vigen Guroian discusses profound fairy tales and the pleasures of gardening. (20 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)
• 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)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
• Mary Midgley, R.I.P. — Philosopher Mary Midgley (1919–2018) was a tireless critic of the reductionist, atomistic claims of modern science. (16 minutes)
• Gisela Kreglinger: Victorian Wisdom for Contemporary Plights — Gisela Kreglinger considers how George MacDonald’s perspective on gender roles might guide us through some of the questions, problems, and concerns we face today. (68 minutes)
• Vigen Guroian: “Awakening the Moral Imagination: Teaching Virtues through Fairy Tales” — Vigen Guroian contrasts the features of character and virtue with those of what is more modernly called “values,” and examines how these different approaches to moral consideration reflect conflicting ways of understanding self-formation. (48 minutes)
• The risk of stories — George Steiner on the necessity of vulnerable imaginations
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 121 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel Gabelman, Curtis White, Michael Hanby, Alan Jacobs, James K. A. Smith, Bruce Herman, and Walter Hansen
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 103 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, David Thomson, Adam McHugh, Glenn C. Arbery, Eric Miller, and Eric Metaxas
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 93 — FEATURED GUESTS: Alan Jacobs, James A. Herrick, Robert C. Roberts, J. Daryl Charles, Allan C. Carlson, and Sheila O’Connor-Ambrose
• 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)
• 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 76 — FEATURED GUESTS: D. H. Williams, Catherine Edwards Sanders, Ted Prescott, Martin X. Moleski, Stephen Prickett, and Barrett Fisher
• The arts and public funding — Ken Myers answers a letter from a high school student asking about whether Christians should support the idea of federal funding for the arts.
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Malvasi, John Lukacs, Steve Talbott, Christian Smith, Eugene Peterson, and Rolland Hein
• The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis — Interviews about Lewis with Clyde Kilby, Michael Aeschliman, James Como, Bruce L. Edwards, Thomas Howard, and Gilbert Meilaender. Plus a reading by Alan Jacobs. (73 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 66 — FEATURED GUESTS: Leon Kass, Nigel Cameron, Susan Wise Bauer, Esther Lightcap Meek, John Shelton Lawrence, and Ralph Wood
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 53 — FEATURED GUESTS: Lawrence Adams, Dana Gioia, Elmer M. Colyer, R. A. Herrera, Margaret Visser, and Joseph Pearce
• Maker of Middle-earth — Tom Shippey, Joseph Pearce, and Ralph Wood examine J. R. R. Tolkien and his mythological Lord of the Rings trilogy to explore what makes Tolkien’s work resonant and a vessel for truth. (86 minutes)
• Till We Have Faces and the Meaning of Myth — Literary critic Thomas Howard explains why C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is best understood not as a novel or fantasy but as a myth. (49 minutes)