Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 148

PREVIEW

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Guests heard on Volume 148

Steven D. Smith, author of Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, on how a modern “religion without God” characterizes what alleges to be secular neutrality

Willem Vanderburg, author of Secular Nations Under New Gods: Christianity’s Subversion by Technology and Politics, on the costs of forgetting the unity and interdependence of Creation

Jeffrey Bilbro, author of Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms, on lessons from Wendell Berry’s poetry, fiction, and essays about the virtues that characterize people who foster sustainable cultures

Emma Mason, author of Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith, on the theological concerns evident in the poetry of Christina Rossetti

Alison Milbank, author of God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition, on how the Gothic literary genre in England expressed ambivalence about the effects of the Reformation

Timothy Larsen, author of George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment, on George MacDonald and Victorian earnestness about faith and anxieties about doubt

Related reading and listening

Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book — Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control
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.
Smith, Steven D. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Steven D. Smith is the co-director of the University of San Diego’s Institute of Law and Religion.
Milbank, Alison — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Alison Milbank is Professor of Theology and literature at the University of Nottingham and an Anglican priest, attached to Southwell Minster, where she is priest vicar and Canon Theologian.
Mason, Emma — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research and teaching are focused on Christianity and literature.
Larsen, Timothy — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College (IL).
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)
In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
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)
A.I., power, control, & knowledge — Ken Myers shares some paragraphs from Langdon Winner‘s seminal book, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977) and from Roger Shattuck‘s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996). An interview with Shattuck is also presented. (31 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)
Technology and social imaginaries — In this interview from 1999, cultural historian David Nye insists that societies have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established, a definite momentum is established. (19 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)
Embedded values and dreams — Felicia Wu Song on why our technologies are not neutral tools
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
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
The consoling hum of technological society — Jacques Ellul on the danger of confusing “technology” with “machines”
We are not Cybermen — Essayist L. M. Sacasas discusses some of the ideas of Ivan Illich, whose work has influenced Sacasas’s own understanding of the anti-human dynamics of technological society. (21 minutes)
America (not the Church) as the New Creation — David E. Nye on one of the founding myths of America
Technological choices become culture — David E. Nye insists that societies do have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established both politically and economically, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
Loss of significance — Steve Talbott on how technology alienates us from the world
Technology as magic — Richard Stivers describes how the hyperrationality of technological societies drives many people to lives guided by instinct, emotion, superstition, and fantasy. Also included in this Feature is an interview with David Gill, who summarizes some of the key ideas in the work of Jacques Ellul, a major influence in the writings of Stivers. (24 minutes)
All how, no why — Langdon Winner summarizes a key theme in Jacques Ellul’s writing about technology
Not in tune with the world — Michael Hanby on how the “technological paradigm” flattens our thinking
What is at stake for us in a self-driving future? — Matthew Crawford vividly details the “personal knowledge” acquired in interaction with physical things, their mecho-systems, and the people who care for them. (16 minutes)
Wise use of educational technologies — David I. Smith articulates the difficulties Christian schools face as they seek to use technology in a faithful way. (24 minutes)
Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
Words as fulcrums — Wendell Berry on the mediating responsibilities of poets
Walter Hooper, R.I.P., and Christina Rossetti’s Advent poems — Walter Hooper (1931-2020) describes his first meeting with C. S. Lewis, a man he so admired and long served. In a second chapter in today’s Feature, Emma Mason explains how Christina Rossetti’s hopeful eschatological beliefs influenced the poems she wrote about the season of Advent. (21 minutes)
Is religious freedom a myth? — Kenneth Craycraft, Jr. details the myths about religious freedom which are so commonly held by American Christians and analyzes their fallacies. (34 minutes)
Christina Rossetti and George MacDonald revisited — Alan Jacobs talks about the theme of renunciation in Christina Rossetti’s poems, and Stephen Prickett looks at aspects of nineteenth-century Romanticism from which George MacDonald’s work emerges. (33 minutes)
Religious pluralism & the calling of Christian intellectuals — From our archives, Robert Wilken talks about religious pluralism in Christian history, and Robert Jenson discusses his essay on the calling of Christian intellectuals. (25 minutes)
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)
How should we then teach? — Following three years of research, David I. Smith discusses what he and his colleagues learned about how educational technologies can be profitable servants and not tyrannical masters. (56 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)
How myth speaks to deep desires in the human heart — Rolland Hein explains that George MacDonald is a writer of myth functioning rightly, and that such myth affects people a-rationally, stirring something in them much deeper than intellect or emotion alone. (15 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)
Why culture won’t prevent anarchy — James Matthew Wilson explains how T. S. Eliot presented a compelling alternative to Matthew Arnold’s belief that the arts and literature could sufficiently replace religion’s function in modern society. (11 minutes)
Alison Milbank: Imaginative Apologetics beyond C. S. Lewis — Alison Milbank offers an approach to defending the Christian faith that restores the imagination as a faculty inseparable from reason. (61 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
Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians — Alison Milbank discusses how both Chesterton and Tolkien restore reason to fantasy and help us to see things as we were meant to see them. (20 minutes)
Science, technology, and the redefinition of the human — In a lecture presented in Washington in 2018, philosopher Michael Hanby argues that the meaning of the human is being radically redefined in our modern “biotechnocracy.” (57 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)
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Thoughts about higher education — Four thoughtful academics discuss how the fact of the Incarnation should inform the ends of higher education. (16 minutes)
Gisela Kreglinger: Victorian Wisdom for Contemporary Plights — Gisela Kreglinger considers how George MacDonald’s perspective on gender roles might guide us through some of the questions, problems, and concerns we face today. (68 minutes)