Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141

PREVIEW

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Guests heard on Volume 141

Grant Wythoff, author of The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientification, on the technophiliac obsessions of Hugo Gernsback, the geeky midwife of modern science fiction

Susanna Lee, author of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority, on how the hard-boiled protagonists of crime fiction in the 1930s and ’40s were replaced by more nihilistic tough guys in the 1950s and ’60s

Gerald R. McDermott, contributor to E. L. Mascall’s Christ, the Christian, and the Church, on how the work of theologian E. L. Mascall can expose blind spots in contemporary Christian thought

Carlos Eire, author of Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650, on how and why religion became “interiorized” in the wake of the reformations of the sixteenth century

Kelly Kapic, author of Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering, on theology’s use of experience and why the Incarnation is the ground of Christian hope

James Matthew Wilson, author of The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition, on the beauty of truth and goodness, and on the necessity of cultivating “intellectual vision”

Related reading and listening

The problem with dynamism without direction — Paulina Borsook on the biological paradigm of technolibertarianism’s love of spontaneous dynamism, whatever the costs
The libertarian spawning-ground of tech bros — Paulina Borsook on high tech’s long-standing animosity toward government and regulation
Tech bros and public power — Paulina Borsook discusses the “bizarrely narcissistic” and ultra-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. (22 minutes)
Sensory overload — FROM VOL. 59 Todd Gitlin discusses the effects of media saturation on our mental and emotional lives. (14 minutes)
Voluntarily silencing ourselves — FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)
Life in a frictionless, synthetic world — FROM VOL. 17 Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes)
The digital revolution and community — FROM VOL. 7 Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)
Education as a pilgrimage and a mystery — In this lecture, James Matthew Wilson gives a compelling argument for understanding the role of a literary or poetic education as an immersion of the whole being in truth and beauty. (43 minutes)
“The angels sang, and the shepherds too” — Ken Myers introduces listeners to the Christmas musical compositions of French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier (c.1645–1704). (19 minutes)
The need for robust Christian intellectual life — In this lecture, Robert Benne surveys the contemporary landscape in which Christian scholars attempt to integrate their faith and their intellectual life. (43 minutes)
Treating Truth with sovereign respect — Henri de Lubac on the urgency of intellectual activity
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 163 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley
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)
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)
Christianity and psychiatry in a “comfortable rapprochement” — FROM VOL. 38 Dan Blazer examines several factors he believes have led to the end of the necessary and creative tension between Christianity and psychiatry. (11 minutes)
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)
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)
Immersion in a different time — FROM VOL. 17 Literary critic Alan Jacobs considers the author Patrick O’Brian as perhaps the best historical novelist ever. (13 minutes)
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)
God is in the details — Flannery O’Connor on why stories rely on the particularities of reality
St. Irenaeus against the Gnostics — In this reading of an essay by theologian Khaled Anatolios, St. Irenaeus is remembered for his synthesis of faith and reason. (52 minutes)
Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
The life was the light of men — Robert Jenson reflects on the relationship that should be sustained between the Church and those of her members with an “intellectual” vocation.
“Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
Discernment of personal mission — Thomas C. Oden on how he came to understand his vocation within a slow growth toward orthodoxy
The unintended consequences of the Reformation — FROM VOL. 114 Historian Brad Gregory discusses the unintended consequences of the Reformation, consequences which continue to trouble us. (26 minutes)
Infrastructures of addiction — Christopher Lasch on the subversive effects of the expectation of novelty
Nihilism in popular culture — FROM VOL. 44Thomas Hibbs, author of Shows about Nothing, discusses the nihilism that runs through films and television shows in recent American popular culture. (9 minutes)
The sacramental vision of G. K. Chesterton — FROM VOL. 112Ralph C. Wood describes G. K. Chesterton’s imagination as especially fruitful in conveying grace and edification to his readers. (19 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
Kapic, Kelly M. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Kelly M. Kapic (PhD, King’s College, University of London) is Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he has taught since 2001.
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
Bridges with structural flaws — FROM VOL. 4What made The Bridges of Madison County so popular, and so flawed? Alan Jacobs offers some insights. (14 minutes)
Living into focus — As our lives are increasingly shaped by technologically defined ways of living, Arthur Boers discusses how we might choose focal practices that counter distraction and isolation. (32 minutes)
Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
Place and imagination — Matthew Stewart on Wallace Stegner’s moral laboratories
Once there was no “secular” — Carlos Eire on the metaphysical assumptions championed in the sixteenth century
Our suffering, and Christ’s — Joel James Shuman and Keith Meador: “The absence of deliverance from sickness or suffering is neither a sign that God has withdrawn favor nor an occasion to abandon hope.”
Promethean medicine? — Stanley Hauerwas on medicine and limits
On medicine and the meaning of suffering — Guests Susan Bergman and Christopher Shannon discuss the meaning of suffering and how we might suffer well with Christ. (19 minutes)
Suffering and the vocation of medicine — Stanley Hauerwas on why the elimination of suffering is an inadequate (and unrealistic) goal for medicine
Faulkner’s tragic vision — Alan Jacobs describes how William Faulkner’s fiction explored the tragedy of living with a legacy of evil acts. (26 minutes)
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)
On remembering and recognition — In memory of Frederick Buechner’s life, Ken Myers shares from his 1996 conversation with the acclaimed writer. Also heard are two interviews with novelist Ron Hansen about the craft of writing fiction. (29 minutes)
“Broken Bodies Redeemed” — Today’s Feature presents a reading of a 2007 article by Gilbert Meilaender that explores the significance for bioethics of the mystery of human being as body and soul. (39 minutes)
Art as aestheticism, love as eroticism, politics as totalitarianism — Augusto Del Noce on the “technological mindset” and the loss of the sense of transcendence
The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that captures some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (26 minutes)
Fuller and truer ways of being — Zena Hitz on some of the blessings of the love of learning
Trails, furrows, and bookish virtues — Zena Hitz offers some rich reflections on the remarkable feature of human life that is the love of learning. (16 minutes)
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