What is really true? Why does beauty matter?

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. Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
3. Treating Truth with sovereign respect — Henri de Lubac on the urgency of intellectual activity
4. 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)
5. Goodness, truth, and conscience — David Crawford examines Karol Wojtyła’s thought on the relationship between conscience and truth. (37 minutes)
6. When language is weaponized — FROM VOL. 52 Jeffrey Meyers explains George Orwell‘s understanding of how language can be used as a weapon in totalitarian movements and regimes. (10 minutes)
7. Multi-leveled language and active spiritual engagement — FROM VOL. 95 Eugene Peterson talks about how Jesus spent most of his time speaking normally and conversationally, and how the Spirit infused this normal speech. (14 minutes)
8. 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)
9. 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)
10. Worldliness vs. otherworldliness — FROM VOL. 38 Sociologist Craig Gay speaks of the charge that Christianity is an otherworldly religion. (12 minutes)
11. Torrential winds of doctrine — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the “dictatorship of relativism”
12. Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
13. 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)
14. 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)
15. 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)
16. 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)
17. The unintended consequences of the Reformation — FROM VOL. 114 Historian Brad Gregory discusses the unintended consequences of the Reformation, consequences which continue to trouble us. (26 minutes)
18. “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)
19. 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)
20. 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)
21. 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)
22. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
23. Divine demonstration — Robert Louis Wilken on the folly of arguing for God’s existence apart from the reality of Christ
24. Barron, Bishop Robert — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Bishop Robert Barron is the bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester (Minnesota) and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
25. Justice and truth — Joseph Ratzinger: “Plato’s philosophy is utterly misconceived when he is presented as an individualistic, dualistic thinker who negates what is earthly and advocates a flight into the beyond.”
26. 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)
27. Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
28. 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)
29. Deconstructing the myths of modernity — In order to counter modernity’s fragmentation, Paul Tyson argues that we must recover a foundation of reality based on meaning and being. (35 minutes)
30. 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)
31. Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
32. Is religious belief really true? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger asks if Christian faith is just lovely subjective consolation, a kind of make-believe world side by side with the real world
33. 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)
34. Liberal arts and the importance of truth — Listen to conversations with two guests from Volume 153, Margarita Mooney and Louis Markos, on the liberal arts and the importance of truth. (26 minutes
35. Unreason destroys freedom — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the relationship between freedom and truth
36. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 152 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Jeffrey Bilbro, Zena Hitz, James L. Nolan, Jr., Bishop Robert Barron, and Jason Blakely
37. 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)
38. Questioning the world’s assumptions down to their very roots — John Milbank on the need for a more robust apologetics
39. What is at stake for us in a self-driving future? — Matthew Crawford vividly details the “personal knowledge” acquired in interaction with physical things, their mecho-systems, and the people who care for them. (16 minutes)
40. Justice and gender, round 2 — Margaret Harper McCarthy, one of the authors of a brief on gender submitted to the Supreme Court, discusses the philosophical and practical implications of fashionable notions of the meaning of gender. (33 minutes)
41. 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)
42. Roger Scruton, R.I.P. — Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12, 2020. In this interview from 2015, Scruton discusses the ways in which the sacred or religious sensibility is prefigured in aesthetic experiences and in our relationships to the world. (20 minutes)
43. On the meaning of gender and the truth of human nature — Margaret Harper McCarthy, one of the authors of a brief on gender submitted to the Supreme Court, discusses the philosophical and practical implications of fashionable notions of the meaning of gender. (29 minutes)
44. 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)
45. 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)
46. 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)
47. 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
48. Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians — Alison Milbank discusses how both Chesterton and Tolkien restore reason to fantasy and help us to see things as we were meant to see them. (20 minutes)
49. 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)
50. The missional mandate of truth — Joseph Ratzinger on the partnership of faith and reason in the coherence of love and truth