Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 118

Related reading and listening

• Cosmetic surgery and human perfectibility — Elizabeth Haiken examines the shift that occurred in 20th century America from a focus on developing character to a focus on developing “personality” and achieving physical perfection. (19 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Chameleon karma: the fate of plasticity — Cultural historian Jeffrey L. Meikle on how the ubiquity of plastic affected the moral imagination of 20th-century Americans
• Self-knowledge versus “selfism” — FROM VOL.10 Psychologist Paul Vitz argues that the modern focus on self-actualization makes the self the highest good in the cosmos. (7 minutes)
• “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)
• 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)
• Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Getting outside of our heads — FROM VOL. 128Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford explores what forms the self, arguing that individuality is an earned competence achieved through habits of submission to various tasks, traditions, and authorities. (20 minutes)
• Christopher Hitchens vs. G. K. Chesterton — Ralph Wood compares Christopher Hitchens‘s view of the cosmos with that of G. K. Chesterton, arguing that Chesterton succeeded where Hitchens failed. (44 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• The danger of not defining “freedom” — Richard Bauckham insists that an adequate understanding of freedom requires recognition of God as the ground of true human freedom
• 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 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)
• Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
• 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)
• The early Church on asceticism and almsgiving — FROM VOL. 118Historian Peter Brown explains that in spite of having had access for centuries to the Church fathers’ numerous writings, only recently have we come to understand the social and material context within which they lived. (18 minutes)
• Fixed certainties, fixed mysteries — FROM VOL. 42Science journalist John Horgan, author of The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation, discusses the limits of neuroscience. (13 minutes)
• 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 dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
• Why not hatcheries? — Ethicist Paul Ramsey (1913–1988) challenges “the unchecked employment of powers the biological revolution places in human hands.”
• The logic of “making” babies — Gilbert Meilaender on the temptation to instrumentalize our bodies
• Rejecting “two-tiered” Thomism — FROM VOL. 155 David Bentley Hart on how “two-tier Thomism” deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. (42 minutes)
• On babies and words — Leon Kass on the re-configuring of human origins
• 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)
• Philosophy and loving the Logos — Robert Louis Wilken on early Christians and the pursuit of a virtuous life
• Mitchell, Mark T. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Mark T. Mitchell is Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College where he teaches political theory.
• Meilaender, Gilbert — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Gilbert Meilaender is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University. He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center and was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2002 to 2009.
• 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
• 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)
• Philip Cushman on Constructing the Self — FROM VOL. 16Psychotherapist Philip Cushman explains how individual well-being becomes a goal, rather than a by-product of living in communities with a shared sense of purpose. (14 minutes)
• Light from Neither the East nor the West — Ken Myers reads an essay by theologian John Betz titled “Light from Neither the East nor the West.” It is the third of three essays by Betz in which he distinguishes a Christian understanding of freedom from the conventional modern definitions. (41 minutes)
• Deep conversion — D. H. Williams, Michael Budde, and Robert Brimlow describe the conventional practices of Christian discipleship practiced by the early Church, practices that encouraged the conversion of mind, will, and feelings. (26 minutes)
• Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
• Promethean medicine? — Stanley Hauerwas on medicine and limits
• Suffering and the vocation of medicine — Stanley Hauerwas on why the elimination of suffering is an inadequate (and unrealistic) goal for medicine
• Health and personhood — Dr. Kimbell Kornu explains how the training of medical professionals should be shaped by a recognition of a Christian understanding of personhood. (22 minutes)
• Human dignity, cosmic hierarchies — Political scientist Robert Kraynak on how Christianity opposes worldly hierarchies with hierarchies of its own
• Challenging the “gospel of democracy” — Robert Kraynak argues that assumptions many modern Christians hold about liberal democracy are rooted in some false ideas about the nature and purpose of civil government. (46 minutes)
• What makes our desires and action intelligible — David Bentley Hart on why we must believe that human beings are by nature inclined to the super-natural
• Freedom on Holiday: The Genealogy of a Cultural Revolution — In this second of three essays, John Betz argues that freedom for the sake of conforming to the Good has been replaced by freedom as the space to choose whatever we want. (52 minutes)
• On moral authority and medicine — Continuing our time travel back to 1992, we hear two more interviews from the pilot tape for the Mars Hill Tapes, with sociologist James Davison Hunter and bioethicist Nigel Cameron. (28 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)
• We Hold These Freedoms: Modern, Postmodern, Christian — An essay by John Betz explores the theological grounding of real freedom. He argues that human freedom cannot be understood apart from divine freedom. (36 minutes)