Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116

Related reading and listening

1. 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)
2. What is lost with labor-saving devices — Romano Guardini on what is lost when cultural pursuits eclipse natural order
3. The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
4. An “austerely chastened” pneumatology — In this lecture, Ephraim Radner critiques modern pneumatology for effectually denying the “difficult givenness” of this life and implicitly subverting our human creatureliness. (40 minutes)
5. Embodied knowledge — FROM VOL. 121 James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes)
6. 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)
7. Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
8. Technology and the kingdom of God — FROM VOL. 63 Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes)
9. 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)
10. “Gender” as ultimate separation — In this November 2018 lecture, Margaret McCarthy explains how the predictions of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae regarding the consequences of separating sex from procreation have proven true. (38 minutes)
11. How words are central to the human experience — FROM VOL. 95 Craig Gay reflects on the essential linguistic nature of humanity: how our growth (or decline) in life is tied to words. (18 minutes)
12. Diverting language from its richest possibilities — FROM VOL. 75 Steve Talbott discusses the rich capacities of language and how technology diminishes them. (18 minutes)
13. 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)
14. The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
15. Why the sexual revolution “failed on its own terms” — FROM VOL. 38 Wendy Shalit argues that when promiscuity is considered natural, women lose the leverage and power inherent in modesty. (13 minutes)
16. 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
17. 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)
18. 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)
19. Approaches to knowing — FROM VOL. 104 Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge. (21 minutes)
20. 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)
21. The roots of American disorder — In this reading of an article from 2021 by Michael Hanby, the critique of Marxism in Augusto del Noce’s work is compared with texts from the American Founders. (79 minutes)
22. 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)
23. 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)
24. Personhood, limits, and academic vocation — FROM VOL. 39 Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
25. What higher education forgot — FROM VOL. 84 Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
26. 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)
27. A Christian philosophy of integrated education — FROM VOL. 61 Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
28. Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
29. 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)
30. The history of Christianity and higher education — FROM VOL. 50 In tracing Christianity’s relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God’s ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
31. Automation and human agency — FROM VOL. 150 Philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford laments the losses of human skill that correspond with gains in mechanical automation. (21 minutes)
32. 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)
33. In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)
34. A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
35. 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
36. 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)
37. A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
38. 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)
39. An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
40. Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
41. 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)
42. Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
43. The ecstasy of the act of knowing — Theologian Paul Griffiths situates our creaturely knowing within the framework of the relation between God and Creation
44. How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
45. 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)
46. “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
47. Cleansing sea breezes — Thomas C. Oden argues that rather than being conformed to contemporary ideological trends, we should be informed by 2000 years of the Church’s wisdom. And Darrell Amundsen corrects some false claims about the early Church’s views on suicide. (27 minutes)
48. On The Abolition of Man — FROM VOL. 154 Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
49. 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
50. Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)