Recovering the meaning of reason

Related reading and listening

1. 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)
2. 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)
3. 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)
4. 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)
5. Recovering the primacy of contemplation — Augusto Del Noce finds in St. Augustine resources to diagnose the fatal flaw in progressivism
6. 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)
7. 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)
8. Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
9. 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)
10. Political community and the good — D. C. Schindler on why political life is inevitably “a particular interpretation of the highest human good”
11. In the image of our devices? — In light of the history of the meaning of intellectus, D. C. Schindler questions the use of the word “intelligence” to describe systems employing large language models. (18 minutes)
12. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
13. Everything about everything comes from God — Theologian Andrew Davison discusses how the idea of participation informs our understanding of God, of Creation, of being, of knowing, of loving, of law, of economics, etc. (28 minutes)
14. 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)
15. Schindler, D. C. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dr. Schindler’s work sheds light on contemporary cultural challenges by drawing on the resources of the classical Christian tradition.
16. The Symbol of Authority — In the second of two lectures given by D. C. Schindler, he explores the nature of authority with reference to the transcendental dance of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. (60 minutes)
17. On Earth as it is in Heaven — FROM VOL. 108Hans Boersma — author of Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry — explains why Christians should reject the modern separation of Heaven and Earth and recover a “sacramental ontology.” (26 minutes)
18. The Authority of the Symbol — In this lecture presented at the CiRCE Institute national conference, D. C. Schindler presents a metaphysical description of what symbols are. (54 Minutes)
19. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS: David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
20. Once there was no “secular” — Carlos Eire on the metaphysical assumptions championed in the sixteenth century
21. Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
22. Freedom, real and counterfeit — D. C. Schindler contrasts the classical and Christian understanding of freedom with the modern understanding of freedom, and explains how true freedom is a condition of harmony with reality. (59 minutes)
23. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
24. The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
25. 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)
26. 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)
27. Questioning the world’s assumptions down to their very roots — John Milbank on the need for a more robust apologetics
28. Shrinking sources of causality — David Bentley Hart on the loss of a recognition of inherent meaning in the natural world
29. Cosmology without God — Modern science is practiced in the context of beliefs that are intrinsically metaphysical and theological, even though practitioners of science claim (and usually genuinely believe) that their disciplines are philosophically neutral. David Alcalde challenges such claims within a sub-field of astrophysics. (21 minutes)
30. Reasoning about values — Revisiting a 1974 text that examined the mutual animosities of the 1960s
31. The religion of the Logos — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on acknowledging the Source of rationality
32. Social media is hate speech — D. C. Schindler argues that much modern speech effectively expresses contempt for that which language (and reason) have been given to us: Truth. (33 minutes)
33. Freedom, ancient and modern — In a brief excerpt from David Bentley Hart’s book Atheist Delusions, and a longer excerpt from an Areopagus Lecture by D. C. Schindler, the modern view of freedom is contrasted with the understanding of freedom present in ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Roman thought. (27 minutes)
34. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 147 — FEATURED GUESTS: R. Jared Staudt, Jason Peters, D. C. Schindler, Craig Gay, Mary Hirschfeld, and Patrick Samway
35. Perceiving the common good during a pandemic — D. C. Schindler reflects on the shape of our way of life in wake of a killer virus, seeing signs both encouraging and sinister. (35 minutes)
36. The reality that science cannot see — Philosopher Paul Tyson illustrates features of daily life that science cannot “see,” such as love, friendship, justice, and hope, and argues that such things are nonetheless real. (20 minutes)
37. Glorious Abasement: John Betz on the Prophetic Critique of J. G. Hamann — Theologian John Betz discusses the eighteenth-century philosopher and translator, Johann Georg Hamann, critic and contemporary of Immanuel Kant and other prominent figures of the German Enlightenment. (54 minutes)
38. D. C. Schindler: “For Freedom Set Free” — D. C. Schindler argues that the Christian notion of religious liberty is a synthesis of the Jewish, Roman, and Greek traditions. (61 minutes)
39. D. C. Schindler on Robert Spaemann — On this Friday Feature, Ken Myers talks with philosopher D. C. Schindler about philosopher Robert Spaemann’s work in general and his defense of anthropomorphism in particular. (14 minutes)
40. The nature of freedom reconsidered — In anticipation of this Fall’s Areopagus Lecture entitled “‘For Freedom Set Free’: Retrieving Genuine Religious Liberty,” we present selections from interviews with three MARS HILL AUDIO guests who have raised questions about the modern understanding of freedom. (27 minutes)
41. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff
42. Why “Creation” is more than “origins” — In this archive interview from Volume 121 of the Journal, Michael Hanby talks about why we shouldn’t assume that science can ever be philosophically and theologically neutral. (32 minutes)
43. James Matthew Wilson: “T. S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy” — James Matthew Wilson examines T. S. Eliot’s cultural conservatism and religious conversion in light of his intellectual and familial influences. (79 minutes)
44. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 143 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Regnerus, Jessica Hooten Wilson, John Henry Crosby, John F. Crosby, Wynand De Beer, and Sørina Higgins
45. 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
46. The essential meaning at the heart of reality — Paul Tyson discusses how the modern preoccupation with doing has distracted us from the meaning of being. To meet the cultural challenges of our moment believers must recovery the ontological richness of the premodern Christian heritage. (21 minutes)
47. The mythic song of modernity — In his book Returning to Reality, philosopher Paul Tyson imagines a grand “Song of Modernity.” In it, he captures the triumphant sense of enlightenment characteristic of modern thought. Ken Myers summarizes some of the key themes in Tyson’s book. (17 minutes)
48. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 132 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Susan Felch, D. C. Schindler, Malcolm Guite, and J. A. C. Redford
49. From a-rational faith to meaningless world — D. C. Schindler on how faith detached from reason guarantees relativism
50. In defense of unity — Peter J. Leithart on the relationship between ecclesial unity and religious liberty