Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124

Related reading and listening

• The physical beauty of music — Music can be likened to a cathedral, says professional guitarist Gordon Kreplin, when it creates through silence and sound a meditative space into which one may enter and encounter God. (14 minutes)
• Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
• 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)
• Counterpoint as a “spirited discussion” — In this essay, John Ahern explains the beauty and order of counterpoint, the accumulation of multiple melodies that come together in a harmonious whole. (20 minutes)
• The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• America’s not-so-Christian past — In a conversation from 2012, historian John Fea discusses the idea of America as a Christian nation. (27 minutes)
• 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)
• When is civil disobedience necessary? — Douglas Farrow examines the relation between “the kings of the earth” and the law of Christ, particularly when governmental law is exercised without reference to natural or divine law. (49 minutes)
• 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)
• 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)
• Education, reason, and the Good — Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson on C. S. Lewis’s argument about natural law
• The past as presence, not souvenir — Historian Christopher Lasch on the importance of recognizing our dependence on the past
• “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)
• Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
• The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
• Hughes, Fiona — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Violinist Fiona Hughes is Artistic Director of Three Notch’d Road: The Virginia Baroque Ensemble, and is a versatile performer of both modern and baroque violin.
• 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)
• We feebly struggle, they in glory shine — Church historian Robert Wilken describes how the early Church’s witness about the nature of truth challenged the assumptions of the surrounding culture. (15 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
• Maximalist music — FROM VOL. 8Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
• Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
• Welcoming one another — Christine Pohl describes the practice of hospitality in Church history and the particular challenges to hospitality we face in our era. (30 minutes)
• Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 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)
• The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 156 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kimbell Kornu, Paul Tyson, Mark Noll, David Ney, William C. Hackett, and Marian Schwartz
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
• 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
• Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
• The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 minutes)
• Beyond proof-texts — Mark Noll argues that the distinctly American practice of interpreting the Bible through proof-texting hampered the abolitionist movement’s effectiveness. (41 minutes)
• Why churches should be more attentive to space — Eric O. Jacobsen discusses New Urbanism with a Christian perspective, imagining how we might organize places in which life may be lived at a human scale and in which real community is nourished. (26 minutes)
• The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
• Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
• Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
• Religious pluralism & the calling of Christian intellectuals — From our archives, Robert Wilken talks about religious pluralism in Christian history, and Robert Jenson discusses his essay on the calling of Christian intellectuals. (25 minutes)
• The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
• The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
• Roger Scruton: Music as an Art — Philosopher Roger Scruton explains why there are some things — music in particular and art in general — which one can’t rightly or fully perceive without making judgments. (32 minutes)
• Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel’s Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel’s time. (19 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 145 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Bruce Hindmarsh, Jason Baxter, John Fea, Laurie Gagne, and Matthew O’Donovan