Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114

Related reading and listening

• Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
• Good stewardship of language — Marilyn Chandler McEntyre discusses central themes from her 2009 book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. ALSO: clips from 6 other programs about language. (36 minutes)
• Bearing well the burdens of the past, present, and future — Louis Markos shows how great literature like the Iliad links us to the human story and strengthens us to live fully and well. (65 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters — FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
• The political wisdom of Edmund Burke — FROM VOL. 28 Daniel Ritchie discusses the enduring political wisdom of British statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke (1729–1797). (13 minutes)
• Literature for wisdom, not propaganda — FROM VOL. 23 Daniel Ritchie provides a constructive alternative to the ideological captivity of literature and literary studies. (13 minutes)
• 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)
• Recovering the primacy of contemplation — Augusto Del Noce finds in St. Augustine resources to diagnose the fatal flaw in progressivism
• Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
• The integration of theoretical and mythic intelligence — FROM VOL. 156 William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes)
• The social irrelevance of secular higher education — FROM VOL. 85 Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
• 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)
• Play as a signal of transcendence — FROM VOL. 2 Father James V. Schall reflects upon the importance of play and contemplation in ancient political thought. (7 minutes)
• Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux — FROM VOL. 147 Biographer and priest Patrick Samway talks about the relationship between fiction writer Flannery O’Connor and the legendary editor Robert Giroux. (21 minutes)
• The artist’s commitment to truth — Fr. Damian Ference, author of Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy. (18 minutes)
• Flannery O’Connor and Thomistic philosophy — Fr. Damian Ference explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy, as evidenced by her reading habits, letters, prayer journal, and, of course, essays and fiction. (48 minutes)
• Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
• 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)
• 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.
• An unwitting agent for the secularization of America — Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden explain how a prominent Christian Founding Father added momentum to the secularization of America
• From democracy to bureaucracy — Historian John Lukacs on the challenges of living at the End of an Age
• 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)
• 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)
• Three historians on history — FROM VOL. 31 This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
• On wonder, wisdom, worship, and work — Classical educator Ravi Jain dives deeply into the nature, purpose, and interconnectedness of the liberal, common, and fine arts. (43 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• The past as presence, not souvenir — Historian Christopher Lasch on the importance of recognizing our dependence on the past
• Faith and unbelief — FROM VOL. 98 This Archive Feature revisits two conversations, one with Roger Lundin and one with David Bentley Hart, on what makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers. (39 minutes)
• “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)
• A fresh and refreshing imagination — FROM VOL. 111Biographer Ian Ker explains why G. K. Chesterton deserves wider recognition as a significant literary critic. (24 minutes)
• A theology of active beauty — In a 2010 lecture, George Marsden examines a few ways in which the distorting effects of Enlightenment rationalism were resisted in the work of Jonathan Edwards. (64 minutes)
• McEntyre, Marilyn — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: After many years of teaching American literature, writing, and medical humanities to undergraduates, Marilyn McEntyre, PhD, works now as a writing coach, retreat leader, and speaker on topics related to language, spirituality, and writing.
• Cain, Susan — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Susan Cain is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
• The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
• Sehat, David — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: David Sehat is Professor of History at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Sehat is a cultural and intellectual historian of the United States.
• Thompson, Fr. Augustine, O.P. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Very Rev. Augustine Thompson, O.P. is a Catholic priest of the Order of Preachers. He is Praeses (President) of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaevel Studies at the University of Toronto.
• Christ, the key to human meaning — Gil Bailie on how the coming of Christ affirmed the intelligibility of human history (and why the abandonment of Christ invites unreason)
• An outrageous idea? — In the late 1990s, George M. Marsden and James Tunstead Burtchaell both wrote books examining the claim that it was far-fetched even to imagine that scholarly work could be an expression of Christian claims about reality. (25 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
• Books, beliefs, and loving conversations — Holly Ordway talks about the need for “intellectual hospitality” when we encounter books (or people) whose beliefs are very different from our own. (19 minutes)
• 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)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 157 — FEATURED GUESTS: Allan C. Carlson, Matthew Stewart, Steven Knepper, Holly Ordway, Norm Klassen, and Norman Wirzba
• Once there was no “secular” — Carlos Eire on the metaphysical assumptions championed in the sixteenth century
• Faulkner’s tragic vision — Alan Jacobs describes how William Faulkner’s fiction explored the tragedy of living with a legacy of evil acts. (26 minutes)
• Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
• 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)