Quarantine’s lessons: patience, hope, the Church, medicine, and more

Related reading and listening

1. Cosmetic surgery and human perfectibility — Elizabeth Haiken examines the shift that occurred in 20th century America from a focus on developing character to a focus on developing “personality” and achieving physical perfection. (19 minutes)
2. 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)
3. Why the sexual revolution “failed on its own terms” — FROM VOL. 38 Wendy Shalit argues that when promiscuity is considered natural, women lose the leverage and power inherent in modesty. (13 minutes)
4. 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)
5. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
6. 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)
7. Medical tools and the shaping of identity — C. Ben Mitchell and Carl Elliott examine how we form judgments about bioethical questions, and how various medical capabilities form us. (27 minutes)
8. 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)
9. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS: David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
10. Promethean medicine? — Stanley Hauerwas on medicine and limits
11. On medicine and the meaning of suffering — Guests Susan Bergman and Christopher Shannon discuss the meaning of suffering and how we might suffer well with Christ. (19 minutes)
12. Suffering and the vocation of medicine — Stanley Hauerwas on why the elimination of suffering is an inadequate (and unrealistic) goal for medicine
13. Health and personhood — Dr. Kimbell Kornu explains how the training of medical professionals should be shaped by a recognition of a Christian understanding of personhood. (22 minutes)
14. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 156 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kimbell Kornu, Paul Tyson, Mark Noll, David Ney, William C. Hackett, and Marian Schwartz
15. Rehabilitating authority — Authority, argues David Koyzis, is an aspect of the image of God, exercised to fulfill human vocations. (30 minutes)
16. 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)
17. Teachers and Learners — Ian Ker shares John Henry Newman’s ideals of learning, and Mark Schwehn discusses the virtues of good teachers. (27 minutes)
18. Communion of saints — Jessica Hooten Wilson asserts that reading stories of holiness in the lives of “literary saints” helps to cultivate Christian character in us. (25 minutes)
19. Medicine within the immanent frame — Charles C. Camosy on how the secularizing of medicine redefines care
20. Patients needing patience — Gilbert Meilaender on the quest for greater longevity
21. How should we then die? — Stanley Hauerwas asks how the fear of death shapes the practice of medicine
22. 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)
23. 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
24. “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)
25. 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)
26. 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)
27. 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)
28. Peter J. Leithart on Church unity — Peter J. Leithart discusses how the sixteenth-century Colloquy of Marburg shifted the understanding of the Eucharist from something that Christians primarily do together to something about which Christians think or believe a certain way. (70 minutes)
29. 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
30. Peter J. Leithart: The Cultural Consequences of Christian Division — Peter J. Leithart discusses how the sixteenth-century Colloquy of Marburg shifted the understanding of the Eucharist from something that Christians primarily do together to something about which Christians think or believe a certain way. (69 minutes)
31. In defense of unity — Peter J. Leithart on the relationship between ecclesial unity and religious liberty
32. Only domesticated religions are safe to be free — Stanley Hauerwas on why “freedom of religion” carries subtle temptations
33. The problem with patriotism in secular democracies — Alasdair MacIntyre on the systematic rejection of the tradition of the virtues in modern political institutions
34. “Freedom” as tyranny — Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon on democracy, desire, and freedom
35. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 123 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nicholas M. Healy, Christian Smith, James K. A. Smith, Esther Lightcap Meek, Richard Viladesau, and Jeremy Begbie
36. The disabling consequences of winsomeness — Stanley Hauerwas on how many modern Christians offered atheists less and less in which to disbelieve.
37. Stanley Hauerwas on the modern idea of freedom — Stanley Hauerwas: “Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world.”
38. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 118 — FEATURED GUESTS: Gilbert Meilaender, Ron Highfield, Mark Mitchell, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Helen Rhee, and Peter Brown
39. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 117 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Dickerson, Jennifer Woodruff Tait, Jeffry Davis, Philip Ryken, and Robert P. George
40. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
41. Roger Kimball: “Josef Pieper: Leisure and Its Discontents” — Roger Kimball introduces listeners to Josef Pieper’s arguments about the nature of leisure, which are claims about the nature of philosophy and of human well-being. (34 minutes)
42. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 102 — FEATURED GUESTS: Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lew Daly, Adam K. Webb, Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson, and Thomas Hibbs
43. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
44. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 98 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Clarke Forsythe, Gilbert Meilaender, Jeanne Murray Walker, Roger Lundin, and David Bentley Hart
45. 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
46. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 89 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jerome Wakefield, Christopher Lane, Dan Blazer, Fred Turner, Barrett Fisher, and Thomas Hibbs
47. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 81 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nigel Cameron, Joel James Shuman, Brian Volck, Russell Hittinger, Mark Noll, and Stephen Miller
48. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 73 — FEATURED GUESTS: Richard John Neuhaus, Nigel Cameron, Carlos F. Gomez, Michael Uhlmann, Patrick Carey, John W. O’Malley, Patricia Owen, Susan Srigley, and Ralph C. Wood
49. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 70 — FEATURED GUESTS: W. Wesley McDonald, C. Ben Mitchell, Carl Elliott, Richard Weikart, Christine Rosen, and Dana Gioia
50. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 66 — FEATURED GUESTS: Leon Kass, Nigel Cameron, Susan Wise Bauer, Esther Lightcap Meek, John Shelton Lawrence, and Ralph Wood