Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20

Related reading and listening

• Three historians on history — FROM VOL. 31 This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
• 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.
• How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
• On wonder, wisdom, worship, and work — Classical educator Ravi Jain dives deeply into the nature, purpose, and interconnectedness of the liberal, common, and fine arts. (43 minutes)
• 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)
• 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 negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism” that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
• Bemused by joy — Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., on G. K. Chesterton’s awareness of the reality of both evil and joy
• God also was a Cave-man — G. K. Chesterton on the convergence of omnipotence and impotence in Bethlehem
• Accounting for “the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry” — Biographer Ian Ker on Chesterton’s rejection of the idea of the evolution of religions
• Seeing the Christian story for what it is — Dale Ahlquist discusses a new edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, to which he contributed an introduction, notes, and commentary. (34 minutes)
• Prescott, Ted — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Theodore Lewis Prescott is Emeritus Professor of Art, Messiah University. He studied art at the Colorado College, and got his MFA in sculpture from the Rinehart School of Sculpture, at MICA.
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
• Christian education and pagan literature — Kyle Hughes on learning from Basil of Caesarea about the curricular choices for Christian educators
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
• 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.
• Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
• Education and human be-ing in the world — In championing a classical approach to teaching, Stratford Caldecott was an advocate for a musical education, affirming the harmonious unity in Creation. (26 minutes)
• Maintaining a connected grasp of things — Ian Ker summarizes the central concern of John Henry Newman’s educational philosophy as developed in The Idea of a University
• The university and the unity of knowledge — Biographer Ian Ker discusses John Henry Newman’s understanding the goal of “mental cultivation.” (17 minutes)
• The future of Christian learning — Historian Mark Noll insists that for Christian intellectual life to flourish, a vision for comprehensive and universal social and cultural consequences of the Gospel has to be assumed. (18 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)
• Sustaining a heritage of wisdom — Louise Cowan (1916–2015) explains how the classics reach the deep core of our imagination and teach us to order our loves according to the wholeness of reality. (16 minutes)
• Sources of wisdom (and of doubt) — Roger Lundin shares what he has appreciated about Mars Hill Audio conversations, and he discusses what makes Christian belief so implausible to non-believers. (32 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)
• Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
• Teachers and Learners — Ian Ker shares John Henry Newman’s ideals of learning, and Mark Schwehn discusses the virtues of good teachers. (27 minutes)
• “Christianity” is gnostic — Peter Leithart on why what the Church is and practices is not a “religion”
• The evolving connotation of “Christianity” — William Cantwell Smith on how the abstraction known as “Christianity” displaced the concrete reality of “Christian living”
• The birth of “religion” — Brent Nongbri on how Christian disunity led to the privatization of God and the gods
• Remembering the networks of giving and receiving — O. Carter Snead on the disabling assumptions of expressive individualism in public bioethics
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
• Visionary education — Josef Pieper on the mistake of confusing education with mere training
• 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
• Remembering Roger Lundin (1949-2015) — Today’s Feature presents our first and last interviews with frequent guest Roger Lundin (1949-2015), in which he shares his love of language and discusses a Christian understanding of desire. (34 minutes)
• On the re-enchantment of education — Stratford Caldecott on teaching in light of cosmic harmony
• Healthy habits of mind — Scott Newstok describes how many efforts at educational reform have become obstacles to thinking well, and he offers a rich and evocative witness to a better way of understanding what thinking is. (20 minutes)
• Equality and the (modern) dilemma of authority — Sociologist Richard Stivers explains the confused understanding in modern culture about equality, individualism, and authority. (16 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 151 — FEATURED GUESTS: Richard Stivers, Holly Ordway, Robin Phillips, Scott Newstok, Junius Johnson, and Peter Mercer-Taylor
• 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)
• Educational provocations — Steve Talbott on establishing ends for education before selecting means
• The flickering of the American mind — Diana Senechal on problems of distraction in education
• 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
• Why churches should be more attentive to space — Eric O. Jacobsen discusses New Urbanism with a Christian perspective, imagining how we might organize places in which life may be lived at a human scale and in which real community is nourished. (26 minutes)
• From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
• The scantily clad public square — Reinhard Hütter on the necessity of the virtue of religion
• Seeing things as they are — F. A. Lea on the imaginative vision of G. K. Chesterton