Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142

PREVIEW

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Guests heard on Volume 142

Stanley Hauerwas, author of The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson, on writing letters to his godson about the virtues

Perry L. Glanzer and Nathan F. Alleman, co-authors of Restoring the Soul of the University, on the fragmentation of modern higher education and why we need theology to unify universities

Jeffrey Bishop, author of The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, on how modern medicine shapes an inadequate understanding of the human body

Alan Jacobs, author of How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, on how contemporary communications media discourage charitable thinking

D. C. Schindler, author of Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty, on the diabolical nature of the modern understanding of freedom

Marianne Wright, author of The Gospel in George MacDonald: Selections from His Novels, Fairy Tales, and Spiritual Writings, on how the gospel comes through in the writings of George MacDonald

Related reading and listening

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)
Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
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)
Infrastructures of addiction — Christopher Lasch on the subversive effects of the expectation of novelty
Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
Why not hatcheries? — Ethicist Paul Ramsey (1913–1988) challenges “the unchecked employment of powers the biological revolution places in human hands.”
The logic of “making” babies — Gilbert Meilaender on the temptation to instrumentalize our bodies
On babies and words — Leon Kass on the re-configuring of human origins
Medical tools and the shaping of identity — C. Ben Mitchell and Carl Elliott examine how we form judgments about bioethical questions, and how various medical capabilities form us. (27 minutes)
Let saints on Earth in concert sing . . . — In this audio reprint of an article from First Things, Church historian Robert Wilken describes how the lives of virtuous Christians became models for imitation.(46 minutes)
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)
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
Glanzer, Perry L. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Perry L. Glanzer is a professor of Educational Foundations at Baylor University and a Resident Scholar with the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion.
Political community and the good — D. C. Schindler on why political life is inevitably “a particular interpretation of the highest human good”
Scholarship’s silos and the eclipse of meaning — Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality
Jacobs, Alan — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Alan Jacobs is a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
Wright, Marianne — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Marianne Wright, a member of the Bruderhof, lives in southeastern New York with her husband and five children.
Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
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
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
Life, liberty, and the defense of dignity — In a 2003 interview, Leon Kass discussed his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. The unifying theme in the book’s essays is the threat of dehumanization in one form or another. (36 minutes)
Earthly things in relation to heavenly realities — In this lecture, Ken Myers argues that the end of education is to train students to recognize what is really real. The things of this earth are only intelligible in light of heavenly realities. (59 minutes)
Schindler, D. C. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dr. Schindler’s work sheds light on contemporary cultural challenges by drawing on the resources of the classical Christian tradition.
The Symbol of Authority — In the second of two lectures given by D. C. Schindler, he explores the nature of authority with reference to the transcendental dance of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. (60 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)
The Authority of the Symbol — In this lecture presented at the CiRCE Institute national conference, D. C. Schindler presents a metaphysical description of what symbols are. (54 Minutes)
A George MacDonald symposium — Excerpts from four interviews talking about the work of George MacDonald: Michael Di Fuccia, Marianne Wright, David Fagerberg, and Daniel Gabelman. (28 minutes)
George MacDonald on the imagination — Readings from two essays by George MacDonald about how the human imagination is “made in the image” of God’s imagination. (20 minutes)
Light from Neither the East nor the West — Ken Myers reads an essay by theologian John Betz titled “Light from Neither the East nor the West.” It is the third of three essays by Betz in which he distinguishes a Christian understanding of freedom from the conventional modern definitions. (41 minutes)
Ruinous reductions and brash bowdlerizations — Ken Myers reads an article by Vigen Guroian, “The Fairy Tale Wars: Lewis, Chesterton, at al. against the Frauds, Experts, and Revisionists.” In the article, Guroian critiques the common practice of retelling traditional stories in ways that eliminate the meaning of the originals. (31 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS: David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
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)
Deconstructing the myths of modernity — In order to counter modernity’s fragmentation, Paul Tyson argues that we must recover a foundation of reality based on meaning and being. (35 minutes)
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
Health and personhood — Dr. Kimbell Kornu explains how the training of medical professionals should be shaped by a recognition of a Christian understanding of personhood. (22 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 156 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kimbell Kornu, Paul Tyson, Mark Noll, David Ney, William C. Hackett, and Marian Schwartz
Rehabilitating authority — Authority, argues David Koyzis, is an aspect of the image of God, exercised to fulfill human vocations. (30 minutes)