Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 115

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)
• 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)
• Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
• Medical tools and the shaping of identity — C. Ben Mitchell and Carl Elliott examine how we form judgments about bioethical questions, and how various medical capabilities form us. (27 minutes)
• Divine demonstration — Robert Louis Wilken on the folly of arguing for God’s existence apart from the reality of Christ
• Bergler, Thomas E. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dr. Tom Bergler serves as Professor of Christian Faith and Practice at Huntington University where he has taught theology, ministry, and Bible courses for over 20 years.
• Davison, Andrew Paul — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Professor Andrew Paul Davison is Starbridge Professor of Theology and Natural Science, University of Cambridge, and Fellow in Theology and Dean of Chapel, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
• 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)
• Distributist & sustainable economics — Two interview from 2010: John C. Médaille summarizes how distributist economics differs from both capitalism and socialism. Then Herman Daly discusses the danger of economic theory abstracted from the actual stuff of Creation. (44 minutes)
• Why economists need meta-economics — Joseph Pearce on the key insight of E. F. Schumacher
• 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)
• 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)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS: David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
• 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)
• Once there was no “secular” — Carlos Eire on the metaphysical assumptions championed in the sixteenth century
• 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)
• Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
• 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)
• The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
• What is really true? Why does beauty matter? — Bishop Robert Barron talks about the necessity of persuading people that theological claims are about things that are objectively true, not just personally meaningful. (14 minutes)
• 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)
• The obligation of prodigality — Daniel Bell on the hedonistic logic of the “new capitalism”
• Our commerce, our selves — Thomas Frank argues that the anti-establishment ethos of the counterculture was not a new phenomenon in the 1960s but was already present in corporate America long before the Beatles showed up. (23 minutes)
• “. . . improvising a raft after shipwreck . . . ” — Gil Bailie on symptoms and sources of the postmodern self adrift
• The existence of the “self” — Joseph E. Davis talks about the concept of identities and why some social theorists have questioned the very existence of selves. (14 minutes)
• 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)
• Discovering inherited metaphysical commitments — Andrew Davison on the importance for theology of becoming more philosophically self-conscious
• Questioning the world’s assumptions down to their very roots — John Milbank on the need for a more robust apologetics
• 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)
• Understanding the doctrine of participation — FROM VOL. 150Theologian and priest Andrew Davison believes that retrieving the historic doctrine of participation is vital to help Christians escape from the default philosophy of the age. (32 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
• Shrinking sources of causality — David Bentley Hart on the loss of a recognition of inherent meaning in the natural world
• 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)
• Reasoning about values — Revisiting a 1974 text that examined the mutual animosities of the 1960s
• The religion of the Logos — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on acknowledging the Source of rationality
• Post-liberalism of an earlier generation — Allan C. Carlson discusses an anthology of articles from Free America, a magazine published between 1937 and 1947 whose writers believed that political democracy could only survive if coupled with decentralized economic democracy. (26 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 147 — FEATURED GUESTS: R. Jared Staudt, Jason Peters, D. C. Schindler, Craig Gay, Mary Hirschfeld, and Patrick Samway
• Loving your neighbor during a pandemic — Brad Littlejohn reflects on how best to ask and answer some of the questions raised by our current disease-ravaged circumstances, particularly questions related to Christian freedom and love of neighbor. (29 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Juvenescence: Robert Pogue Harrison on Cultural Age — Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western culture is on the cusp of a new mode of civilization that can either result in a rejuvenation of the legacies of the past or in their juvenilization, the latter of which would lead to a loss of cultural memory and the infantilization of desires. (47 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• Recovering the meaning of reason — James Peters discusses how Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Pascal, and many others understood the nature and purpose of reason quite differently from the common modern understanding. Also, D. C. Schindler explains how consciousness and reason necessarily involve reaching outside of ourselves. (24 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff