Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140

PREVIEW

The player for this Journal volume is only available to current members or listeners with a legacy account. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.

Guests heard on Volume 140

Matthew Rubery, author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, on the history of the “talking book,” and on how reading aloud differs from listening to it being read

James A. Herrick, author of Visions of Technological Transcendence: Human Enhancement and the Rhetoric of the Future, on the “post-human” aspirations of the transhumanist movement, and how its plausibility is established by stories

Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro, authors of Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place, on lessons that universities should heed from Wendell Berry’s essays, poetry, and fiction about commitment to living in a place

Timothy Gloege, author of Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, on the influence of business methods on twentieth-century evangelicalism through the shaping of Moody Bible Institute

David Hollinger, author of Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, on how the sons and daughters of mid-twentieth-century missionaries to Asia came back to the U.S. and influenced government, journalism, and the academy

Barrett Fisher on the themes of the challenge of faithfulness as presented in Shusaku Endo’s Silence and in Martin Scorsese’s film version

Related reading and listening

Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
Herrick, James A. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: James A. Herrick was for twenty years the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College in Holland, MI, where he taught from 1984 to 2020.
Bilbro, Jeffrey — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Jeffrey Bilbro is Associate Professor of English at Grove City College and Editor-in-Chief at the Front Porch Republic.
Ingmar Bergman and God — Gene D. Phillips, S.J. on the shape of Ingmar Bergman’s religious pondering
Postmodern manners and morals — Mary P. Nichols on the films of Whit Stillman as comedies of manners
Movies and terminal irony — Two archive interviews explore how the films of Ingmar Bergman and Whit Stillman sustain a degree of moral depth absent in most movies. (30 minutes)
Baker, Jack R. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Jack R. Baker is Principal, Internal Communications at a fintech company. He is an expert writer and communicator whose career has spanned education, ecommerce, non-profits, and fintech.
The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
Fisher, Barrett — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dr. Barrett Fisher II is the dean of academic programs for the College of Arts and Sciences in Bethel University (St. Paul, Minnesota), where he served as professor of English and department chair, as well as faculty development coordinator, before moving into full-time administration.
The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
The academy’s deconstruction of both person and community — Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”
From university to multiversity to demoversity — Alvin Kernan on tectonic shifts in higher education since the 1960s
Rubery, Matthew — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature, Queen Mary University of London.
Scholarship’s silos and the eclipse of meaning — Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality
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)
Christian scholars and the secularized academy — Mark Noll on why Christian intellectual vitality requires a vision for the universality of Christian truth
The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for “re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
Place and imagination — Matthew Stewart on Wallace Stegner’s moral laboratories
Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 152 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Jeffrey Bilbro, Zena Hitz, James L. Nolan, Jr., Bishop Robert Barron, and Jason Blakely
Words as fulcrums — Wendell Berry on the mediating responsibilities of poets
The wide, wide resonance of local details — Novelist Larry Woiwode on the unbreakable bond between specificity and universality
Taking words into the soul — Eugene Peterson on reading as an art of chewing, savoring, and digesting
Reading reflectively during Lent — As Lent is a time of more deliberate reflection and renewal, Marilyn McEntyre talks about the kind of attentiveness to words that can refresh and enable readers. (21 minutes)
Reading with our whole might — Marilyn McEntyre on engaging texts receptively
Becoming a serious and receptive reader — David Lyle Jeffrey offers a thoughtful reading of C. S. Lewis’s account of thoughtful reading
The theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar — Theologian Rodney Howsare unpacks the dense but important theology of Hans Urs von Balthazar, revealing how the “God question” is implicit or explicit in all human questions. (14 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 148 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, Willem Vanderburg, Jeffrey Bilbro, Emma Mason, Alison Milbank, and Timothy Larsen
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
Confronting modernity through farming — Jesse Straight, who nurtures the life of Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia, talks about how he decided to pursue a vocation as a farmer in an effort to discover a way of life that worked against the characteristic fragmentation so dispiriting in modern culture. (24 minutes)
Lessons from quarantine: Making do with tinned fruit — In this audio reprint of “Wendell Berry and Zoom,” Front Porch Republic editor Jeffrey Bilbro reflects on two metaphors that can help put our new-found “dependency” on web-based video conferencing into perspective: tinned fruit and a prosthetic limb. (17 minutes)
Six recent books worthy of note — Ken Myers shares a summary of six recent books that we want our listeners to know about but whose authors we won’t be interviewing. (15 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
Words made audible, dwelling among us — Abigail Williams describes how, in the eighteenth century, the practices of reading aloud survived even as private, silent reading was becoming more common. (19 minutes)
The inevitability of escalating public animosity — With excerpts from books and lectures by Alasdair MacIntyre, Oliver O’Donovan, and Wendell Berry, Ken Myers argues that modern political theory has guaranteed increasing levels of public conflict. (19 minutes)
Thoughts about higher education — Four thoughtful academics discuss how the fact of the Incarnation should inform the ends of higher education. (16 minutes)
Mark Shiffman: “Humanity 4.5” — While it is tempting to dismiss transhumanism as a fringe science fiction, Mark Shiffman warns that the Cartesian aspirations of transhumanists are becoming more accepted and more common. (45 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 136 — FEATURED GUESTS: Thomas Albert Howard, Mark Noll, Andrew Pettegree, Peter J. Leithart, Norm Klassen, James Litton, and Joseph O’Brien
Against the machine — How careless use of mechanistic metaphors obscures the mystery of life
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 118 — FEATURED GUESTS: Gilbert Meilaender, Ron Highfield, Mark Mitchell, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Helen Rhee, and Peter Brown
Faith of our fathers — Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity argues that Jeffersonian and Jacksonian visions of human flourishing stamped American Christianity with an individualistic character that fundamentally shaped the American Church and its message.
Where mortals dwell — FROM VOL. 113Theologian Craig Bartholomew provides a biblically rich critique of the contemporary “crisis of place,” a disorienting condition caused by neglect of the meaning of our embodiment. (21 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 113 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven Shapin, Arthur Boers, Christine Pohl, Norman Wirzba, Craig Bartholomew, and David I. Smith
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 106 — FEATURED GUESTS: Adam Briggle, John C. Médaille, Christopher Page, Christian Smith, Herman Daly, and Thomas Hibbs
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 103 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, David Thomson, Adam McHugh, Glenn C. Arbery, Eric Miller, and Eric Metaxas
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh