Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 108

Related reading and listening

• The historian’s communal role as storyteller — FROM VOL. 155 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)
• When is civil disobedience necessary? — Douglas Farrow examines the relation between “the kings of the earth” and the law of Christ, particularly when governmental law is exercised without reference to natural or divine law. (49 minutes)
• 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)
• Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
• Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
• Renewal of authentic political authority — Brad Littlejohn builds a case for the idea that authority makes free action possible, illustrating how that occurs within the forms of political and epistemic authority, properly understood and wisely practiced. (45 minutes)
• Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book — Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control
• Education, reason, and the Good — Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson on C. S. Lewis’s argument about natural law
• Not good to be alone — In a lecture titled “Gender and the Common Good,” Margaret Harper McCarthy argues that the current ideology regarding gender fundamentally separates people from one another and finally even from themselves. (34 minutes)
• Discerning an alternative modernity — In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)
• The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
• Song, Felicia Wu — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Felicia Wu Song is a cultural sociologist who studies the social effects of digital technologies on community and identity in contemporary life.
• Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
• The academy’s deconstruction of both person and community — Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”
• Boersma, Hans — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Fr. Hans Boersma holds the St. Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin.
• Howard, Thomas Albert — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard is Professor of Humanities and History and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University.
• Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
• Freedom from the nature of things? — Leon Kass on the pressure exerted by the authority of science to embrace reductionistic materialism
• Life, liberty, and the defense of dignity — In a 2003 interview, Leon Kass discussed his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. The unifying theme in the book’s essays is the threat of dehumanization in one form or another. (36 minutes)
• Among Oppenheimer’s company — James L. Nolan, Jr., the author of Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, discusses the Manhattan Project as a case study in the dangers of technological enthusiasm outpacing wisdom and caution. (27 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Alice von Hildebrand centennial — Today’s Feature presents a recording of remarks made by Alice von Hildebrand at an event celebrating her 90th birthday, where she spoke of gratitude and the gifts of God in her life. (17 minutes)
• Welcoming one another — Christine Pohl describes the practice of hospitality in Church history and the particular challenges to hospitality we face in our era. (30 minutes)
• Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
• Once there was no “secular” — Carlos Eire on the metaphysical assumptions championed in the sixteenth century
• The Christian humanism of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — One of the main themes emphasized by these three guests is that Solzhenitsyn was not principally concerned with politics, but with human nature and purpose, understood in light of the Christian account of reality. (39 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 156 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kimbell Kornu, Paul Tyson, Mark Noll, David Ney, William C. Hackett, and Marian Schwartz
• Rehabilitating authority — Authority, argues David Koyzis, is an aspect of the image of God, exercised to fulfill human vocations. (30 minutes)
• Common good(s) and authority — Victor Lee Austin describes the ways in which human action is free and flourishing when authority is active and honored. (26 minutes)
• Science, the only reliable leader (but to where?) — Stephen Gaukroger on the replacement of political, social, and cultural goals with scientific, technological, and economic ones
• Properly this-worldly by being fundamentally other-worldly — Hans Boersma on the necessity of affirming the links between Heaven and Earth
• Recognizing a frayed tapestry — Hans Boersma summarizes the theological concerns shared by the members of the nouvelle théologie movement
• Recovering a sacramental imagination — Hans Boersma argues that we need to recover the pre-modern view that Creation not only points to God, but that it participates in the very being of God — that in God we live and move and have our being. (29 minutes)
• Recovering natural philosophy — Science teacher Ravi Scott Jain discusses natural philosophy, the “love of wisdom in the realm of nature,” as the overarching discipline in the sciences. (21 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 155 — FEATURED GUESTS: Donald Kraybill, Thaddeus Kozinski, David Bentley Hart, Nigel Biggar, Ravi Scott Jain, and Jason Baxter
• Embedded values and dreams — Felicia Wu Song on why our technologies are not neutral tools
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
• With Eastern eyes — Paul Valliere and Vigen Guroian discuss questions of law, politics, and human nature from the Orthodox tradition. (34 minutes)
• Postmodern man in search of a soul — Christopher Kaczor argues that celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson asks important, forgotten questions as a “fellow traveler” to Christianity. (27 minutes)
• Remembering the networks of giving and receiving — O. Carter Snead on the disabling assumptions of expressive individualism in public bioethics
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
• Power to the people — Nathan O. Hatch on the DIY spirit of early American Christianity
• The meaning of the modern eclipse of authority — Augusto Del Noce on the greatest modern reversal
• 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
• Convivial is beautiful — Ivan Illich on “the opposite of industrial productivity”
• We are not Cybermen — Essayist L. M. Sacasas discusses some of the ideas of Ivan Illich, whose work has influenced Sacasas’s own understanding of the anti-human dynamics of technological society. (21 minutes)
• Politics in light of the Ascension — Oliver O’Donovan on the necessity of situating all political authority within redemptive history
• Democratic Authority at Century’s End — Jean Bethke Elshtain summarizes mid-twentieth-century concerns of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) about the growing suspicion about the very idea of authority. (41 minutes)