Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159

Related reading and listening

• From democracy to bureaucracy — Historian John Lukacs on the challenges of living at the End of an Age
• Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
• The historian’s communal role as storyteller — FROM VOL. 155 Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes)
• Three historians on history — FROM VOL. 31 This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
• “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
• Infrastructures of addiction — Christopher Lasch on the subversive effects of the expectation of novelty
• The past as presence, not souvenir — Historian Christopher Lasch on the importance of recognizing our dependence on the past
• Not good to be alone — In a lecture titled “Gender and the Common Good,” Margaret Harper McCarthy argues that the current ideology regarding gender fundamentally separates people from one another and finally even from themselves. (34 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)
• Discerning an alternative modernity — In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)
• Farney, Kirk — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dr. Kirk D. Farney is Vice President for Advancement, Vocation, and Alumni Engagement, Wheaton College. He is an historical scholar and teacher, and an academic, corporate, and philanthropic leader.
• The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
• Wehr, Kathryn — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Kathryn Wehr is Managing Editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. She recently published a scholarly edition of The Man Born to be King in partnership with the Marion E. Wade Center (IVP Academic).
• Kaethler, Andrew Thomas John — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dr. Andrew Kaethler is Academic Dean and Associate Professor of Theology at Catholic Pacific College. Kaethler specializes in theological anthropology, particularly in the work of Joseph Ratzinger and Alexander Schmemann.
• Christ, the key to human meaning — Gil Bailie on how the coming of Christ affirmed the intelligibility of human history (and why the abandonment of Christ invites unreason)
• The rich significance of everyday life — In this interview from 2000, Roger Lundin — a frequent guest on our Journal — explains how the poetry of Richer Wilbur connects with the verse of other New England poets. (24 minutes)
• The desires of the heart, the constraints of creation — Roger Lundin describes how Richard Wilbur’s poetry connects aesthetic experience to life in the world.
• Put not your trust in tyrants — Andrew Willard Jones contrasts the pre-modern understanding of political power with the modern view. (46 minutes)
• In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
• Christology and human relationality — Joseph Ratzinger on how the longing for eternity expressed in human love is an analogue of Trinitarian love
• Freeing dogma from arcane captivity — Dorothy L. Sayers argues that chattering about “Christian values” while ignoring theology is pointless
• Dorothy L. Sayers revisited — In interviews from 1993 and 1999, biographer Alzina Stone Dale and novelist Jill Paton Walsh talk about the life and work of Dorothy L. Sayers. (24 minutes)
• Among Oppenheimer’s company — James L. Nolan, Jr., the author of Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, discusses the Manhattan Project as a case study in the dangers of technological enthusiasm outpacing wisdom and caution. (27 minutes)
• A frail, fedora-wearing Prometheus — Roger Shattuck on the moral confusion of J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Culture in trinitarian perspective — An article by theologian Tracey Rowland titled “Joseph Ratzinger’s Trinitarian Theology of Culture” summarizes the ramifications of Ratzinger’s confidence that a recognition of the Trinity is the foundation of any reliable and faithful account of the relationship between faith and culture. (65 minutes)
• A remedy for relativism — Geoffrey Wainwright analyzes Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s thought on how the crisis of relativism in the West manifests in society and the arts, showing how Ratzinger grounded his response in a deep theology of worship and liturgy. (78 minutes)
• The Christian humanism of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — One of the main themes emphasized by these three guests is that Solzhenitsyn was not principally concerned with politics, but with human nature and purpose, understood in light of the Christian account of reality. (39 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)
• Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
• Is religious belief really true? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger asks if Christian faith is just lovely subjective consolation, a kind of make-believe world side by side with the real world
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
• All manner of thing shall be well — T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is regarded by many as his greatest accomplishment. Today’s Feature presents a lecture about this monumental work, a talk given in 2019 by Dr. Janice Brown. (58 minutes)
• Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
• With Eastern eyes — Paul Valliere and Vigen Guroian discuss questions of law, politics, and human nature from the Orthodox tradition. (34 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)
• The consequential witness of St. Patrick — Thomas Cahill describes how the least likely saviors of Western heritage, the Irish, copied all of classical and Christian literature while barbarians rampaged through the rest of Europe. (16 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
• Republican freedom — and ideological flexibility — Mark Noll on the novelty of America’s Christian republicanism
• The purpose of government and God’s eternal purpose — Philip Turner on understanding the state in light of the eschatological reality of the Church
• The Church and the powers that be — Historian Mark Noll summarizes Christian ideas about political life in the last few centuries, examining how those ideas were worked out in various contexts in Western Europe and North America. (39 minutes)
• 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)
• The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
• Unreason destroys freedom — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the relationship between freedom and truth
• 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
• 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)
• Politics in light of the Ascension — Oliver O’Donovan on the necessity of situating all political authority within redemptive history
• 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)
• Feelings made articulate — Glenn C. Arbery on poetry and the intelligibility of the inner life
• Words as fulcrums — Wendell Berry on the mediating responsibilities of poets
• Richard Wilbur: R.I.P. — Poet Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) describes how poetry is at once profoundly private and yet essentially public. Poetry — like love — calls us to the things of this world. (44 minutes)