Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142

Related reading and listening

1. A prophetic “wake-up call” — In this 2024 lecture honoring the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth, Malcolm Guite explores MacDonald’s power to awaken readers’ spirits and effect in them a change of consciousness. (59 minutes)
2. “You love the man at once” — Marianne Wright on the generosity and geniality of George MacDonald
3. Perceiving truths that dazzle gradually — Rolland Hein on lessons from George MacDonald about the imagination as a spiritual faculty
4. We wonder as they wander — Daniel Gabelman on the spiritual geography of George MacDonald’s fairyland
5. Foolishness, gravity, and the Church — In this essay, Albert L. Shepherd V explains why George MacDonald’s story “The Light Princess” is meant for “all who are childlike in faith and imagination.” (8 minutes)
6. Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
7. “Prophet of holiness” — Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
8. The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
9. 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)
10. Embodied knowledge — FROM VOL. 121 James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes)
11. The (super)natural theology of fairy-tales — Alison Milbank describes Chesterton’s belief that story-telling is an affirmation of transcendent meaning
12. The powerful presence of the body — FROM VOL. 9 Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 minutes)
13. The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art — FROM VOL. 88 Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
14. 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)
15. 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)
16. Beauty, the body, and the “true self” — FROM VOL. 62 Lilian Calles Barger shows the necessity and beauty of healthy embodiment and challenges gnostic ideas found in the church that particularly distort the experiences of women. (15 minutes)
17. A regard for the whole person — FROM VOL. 16 Alan Jacobs discusses the clinical stories of neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose ability to bring out the dignity and personhood of his “characters” (patients) rivals that of many novelists. (11 minutes)
18. Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia — Alex Markos explores the transformational power of Aslan as the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (31 minutes)
19. The gift of meaningful work — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler argues that genuine work is inherently meaningful and facilitates an encounter with reality and therefore, ultimately, with God. (36 minutes)
20. Goodness, truth, and conscience — David Crawford examines Karol Wojtyła’s thought on the relationship between conscience and truth. (37 minutes)
21. Multi-leveled language and active spiritual engagement — FROM VOL. 95 Eugene Peterson talks about how Jesus spent most of his time speaking normally and conversationally, and how the Spirit infused this normal speech. (14 minutes)
22. The relationship between prudence and reality  — In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how the virtue of prudence is fundamentally connected with a deep and anchored understanding of reality. (54 minutes)
23. Why the sexual revolution “failed on its own terms” — FROM VOL. 38 Wendy Shalit argues that when promiscuity is considered natural, women lose the leverage and power inherent in modesty. (13 minutes)
24. 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)
25. A metaphysics of realism, relationality, and personalism — John Milbank gives a survey and critique of the efforts of 20th and 21st century theologians to articulate a Trinitarian ontology that reflects reality and counters secularization. (61 minutes)
26. Worldliness vs. otherworldliness — FROM VOL. 38 Sociologist Craig Gay speaks of the charge that Christianity is an otherworldly religion. (12 minutes)
27. 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)
28. Apprehending the enduring things — Vigen Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. (53 minutes)
29. Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
30. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
31. 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)
32. 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)
33. 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)
34. 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)
35. 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)
36. 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)
37. Is liberalism compatible with religious freedom? — D. C. Schindler relies on two Thomistic axioms to illustrate why liberalism — which claims to offer a minimalist conception of the common good — is ultimately incompatible with a Catholic understanding of religious freedom. (34 minutes)
38. 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)
39. “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)
40. “A state of divine carelessness” — FROM VOL. 121 Daniel Gabelman attempts to correct the notion that George MacDonald prizes seriousness and sobriety. (20 minutes)
41. No neutral view of the cosmos — Ken Myers argues that Christians need to recover a “whole-earth discipleship” that enables them to think Christianly about all areas of life, including public life. (50 minutes)
42. 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)
43. 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
44. 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)
45. Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
46. Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
47. Experiencing literature in its wholeness — FROM VOL. 50Glenn Arbery uses the analogies of sports fandom and ritual to explain how a “long habituation” in learning about form in literature enables one to enter into a greater depth of experience of reality through literature. (26 minutes)
48. Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
49. Infrastructures of addiction — Christopher Lasch on the subversive effects of the expectation of novelty
50. “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)