Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140

PREVIEW

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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

Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters — FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
Early evangelical response to C. S. Lewis — Historian Mark Noll discusses the reasons why American evangelicals were initially slow to warm to Lewis. (15 minutes)
The Gospel as the foundation of dialogue — FROM VOL. 83 Professor Paul Weston discusses theologian Lesslie Newbigin’s time in India and how it influenced his thought and work. (17 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
“Muscular Christianity” and sport as language — In light of this summer’s Olympic Games, we present two sports-related archive interviews: Clifford Putney on Protestant emphasis on fitness at the turn of the 19th century; and Andrei S. Markovits on Americans and soccer. (23 minutes)
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
Productivity or thrift? — Wendell Berry contrasts an economy of productivity (which invites extravagance) and an economy of thrift (which takes care of things)
The destructive logic of short-term thinking — Wendell Berry on the perils of ignoring the nature of Nature
Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
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)
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 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
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)
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
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)
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)