Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109

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 liturgical time — In this lecture, Gregory Wilbur explains how liturgy and liturgical time align us to the rhythms and order of Creation, forming us as disciples. (45 minutes)
3. Perceiving truths that dazzle gradually — Rolland Hein on lessons from George MacDonald about the imagination as a spiritual faculty
4. Foolishness, gravity, and the Church — In this essay, Albert L. Shepherd V explains why George MacDonald’s story “The Light Princess” is meant for “all who are childlike in faith and imagination.” (8 minutes)
5. Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
6. “Prophet of holiness” — Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
7. Critiquing “empire criticism” — Allan Bevere and Peter Leithart evaluate “empire criticism,” a way of reading the New Testament with an anti-imperial focus. (36 minutes)
8. The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
9. The powerful presence of the body — FROM VOL. 9 Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 minutes)
10. The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art — FROM VOL. 88 Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
11. Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud — FROM VOL. 7 Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
12. Depicting the human form — FROM VOL. 6 Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 minutes)
13. The Bully Pulpit: Presidential Rhetoric and True Leadership — Elvin Lim talks about the decline of the content of presidential rhetoric and its consequences to democracy. (49 minutes)
14. Touch’d with a coal from heav’n — Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology
15. How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
16. 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)
17. The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
18. 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)
19. Recovering the primacy of contemplation — Augusto Del Noce finds in St. Augustine resources to diagnose the fatal flaw in progressivism
20. Festivity and the goodness of Creation — Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)
21. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
22. The formation of affections — FROM VOL. 101 James K. A. Smith explains how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy. (15 minutes)
23. Bearing witness through poetry — Roger Lundin discusses the incarnational witness of poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), exploring his service to truth and to his native tongue, Polish. (16 minutes)
24. Czesław Miłosz: A Poet of Luminous Things — Roger Lundin discusses the themes, breadth, and depth of poet Czeslaw Milosz‘s work, explaining how Milosz incarnated in his life and work a sense of exile and alienation so common to modern man. (43 minutes)
25. 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)
26. When is a market “free”? — William T. Cavanaugh argues for a richer conception of freedom than the reductionist one promoted by economist Milton Friedman. (44 minutes)
27. Prudence in politics — FROM VOL. 146 Henry T. Edmondson, III talks about Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of political life, which was influenced by a range of thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk. (19 minutes)
28. Creation’s goodness and human faithfulness — J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens on Wendell Berry’s understanding of how Creation is a gift with certain givenness
29. Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
30. A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
31. Honoring the pigness of pigs — FROM VOL. 137 Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
32. Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
33. Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
34. Soundings of the human soul — Professor John H. Timmerman discusses the poetry of the late Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) and his visit to her home, Eagle Pond Farm. (16 minutes)
35. Jane Kenyon: Living and Dying at Eagle Pond Farm — Biographer John H. Timmerman discusses the life and work of poet Jane Kenyon (1947–1995). (53 minutes)
36. The formative power of hymns and hymnbooks — FROM VOL. 149 Christopher Phillips discusses the cultural and spiritual effects of hymns and the “thingness” of hymnals. (18 minutes)
37. Insisting that political leaders are incapable of obeying Christ — Oliver O’Donovan on the unintended consequences of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
38. An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
39. Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
40. What does it mean to be a creature? — Canon-theologian Simon Oliver explains how and why the doctrine of Creation is cardinal and must frame all theology. (62 minutes)
41. “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
42. 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)
43. The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism” that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
44. 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)
45. The sacramental vision of G. K. Chesterton — FROM VOL. 112Ralph C. Wood describes G. K. Chesterton’s imagination as especially fruitful in conveying grace and edification to his readers. (19 minutes)
46. 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)
47. Milton Friedman meets Augustine — We present an interview from our archives with theologian William Cavanaugh, in which he examines the free market, consumerism, globalization, and scarcity, all parsed within an unabashedly theological framework. (37 minutes)
48. 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)
49. 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)
50. Lessons from Leviticus — The book of Leviticus may be assumed to be irrelevant for charting a way through the challenges of modernity. Theologian Peter J. Leithart disagrees. (22 minutes)