PREVIEW
Guests heard on Volume 40
Joseph Epstein, on writing essays and education through magazines
John Gray, author of False Dawn, on the cultural contradictions of global capitalism
Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., author of The American Myth of Religious Freedom, on why the First Amendment doesn’t really protect Christian liberty
William T. Pizzi, author of Trials without Truth: Why Our System of Criminal Trials Has Become an Expensive Failure and What We Need to Do to Rebuild It, on the defects in America’s legal system
Pamela Walker Laird, author of Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing, on how nineteenth-century advertising promoted progress
Albert Borgmann, author of Holding onto Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, on how technology disengages us from experiencing reality
Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon, on the “eureka” moments with codes and computers
Alan Jacobs on why Harry Potter’s magic shouldn’t trouble Christians
Related reading and listening
- Learning from experience — Flannery O’Connor on belief and experience
- How social media truncates relationships — In this lecture, Felicia Wu Song explains how social media industrializes and monetizes our relationships, forming us in modes of relationships and identity that are detrimental to ourselves and to society. (41 minutes)
- Gratitude and stewardship as political postures —
FROM VOL. 118 Mark Mitchell explores the consequences of four concepts that are sadly missing from most political debates today: creatureliness, gratitude, human scale, and place. (18 minutes) - Making contact with reality —
FROM VOL. 139 Esther Lightcap Meek discusses the realism of philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi. (23 minutes) - Knowing the world through the body —
FROM VOL. 76 Professor Martin X. Moleski explains why Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) left his career in science to become a philosopher. (16 minutes) - How advertising detaches us from the world —
FROM VOL. 13 Historian and cultural critic Jackson Lears discusses the power of advertising to reinforce and shape cultural attitudes about material goods. (9 minutes) - In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
- Lex Rex, or Vox Populi Lex, or Rex Lex? — Law professor Li-ann Thio on the theological roots of belief in the rule of law
- Impact of “infotainment” on community — Neil Gabler and C. John Sommerville discuss how the mentalities conveyed by our experience with communications media work against the nurturing of community. (36 minutes)
- On the Degeneration of Attentiveness — Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
- Defined by what we buy —
FROM VOL. 48 Gary Cross argues that Americans are uniquely susceptible to the temptation to define ourselves by what we buy. (10 minutes) - Modernity and the shaping of America —
FROM VOL. 48 Historian Jon Butler explains how aspects of modernity were already present and at work in colonial American life prior to 1776. (12 minutes) - On Eugenics in America — Christine Rosen explores early eugenics support in the early 1900s and current “participatory evolution” practices. (50 minutes)
- Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
- Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
- “The system will be first” —
FROM VOL. 27 Robert Kanigel describes the transformation of work due to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concept of scientific management. (11 minutes) - Choices about the uses of technology — This Feature presents interviews with David Nye and Brian Brock related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. (31 minutes)
- What it means to be a person —
FROM VOL. 147 Sociologist Craig Gay argues that in order to address the challenges of a technological approach to the world, we need to recover the Christian tradition’s robust theology of personhood. (24 minutes) - Voluntarily silencing ourselves —
FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes) - Souls in cyberspace —
FROM VOL. 25 Douglas Groothuis examines the worldview and mythology behind the creation and marketing of the Internet. (13 minutes) - Life in a frictionless, synthetic world —
FROM VOL. 17 Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes) - The digital revolution and community —
FROM VOL. 7 Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes) - Metaphysical impulses beneath techno-utopianism —
FROM VOL. 38 Erik Davis describes his research on how humans’ fascination with technology is permeated with “mythic energy” and gnostic aspirations. (11 minutes) - Post-Christian America and the “unlimited technological future” — George Parkin Grant on technology and the Puritan legacy of “unflinching wills”
- Progress and God’s providence in American history — Historians Daniel Walker Howe and George McKenna explain religious understandings of God’s purpose for America in the 19th century and colonial era, respectively. (34 minutes)
- Alchemy, astrology, energy, and gnosticism —
FROM VOL. 85 Catherine Albanese describes the varieties of “metaphysical religion” popular in early American history and draws connections with the more recent New Age movement. (14 minutes) - “A sign of contradiction” — In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 minutes)
- Education that counters alienation — In this lecture, Jeanne Schindler explores how digital technologies warp not only education but our experience of being human. (30 minutes)
- Education vs. conditioning — Education necessarily involves metaphysical and theological preconditions, and Michael Hanby argues that our current education crisis is a result of society rejecting these preconditions. (41 minutes)
- Privacy and a right to kill —
FROM VOL. 60 Russell Hittinger explains the legal history behind the “right to privacy” and how it was used in landmark cases involving abortion and physician-assisted suicide. (33 minutes) - Education as a pilgrimage and a mystery — In this lecture, James Matthew Wilson gives a compelling argument for understanding the role of a literary or poetic education as an immersion of the whole being in truth and beauty. (43 minutes)
- Submission to mathematical truth — In this lecture, Carlo Lancellotti argues that integration of the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of mathematics is needed in a robust liberal arts mathematics curriculum. (25 minutes)
- When philosophy loses its way —
FROM VOL. 52 Ralph McInerny (1929–2010) speaks about themes from his 1999 Gifford Lectures, which relate how natural theology came to be regarded as pointless, resulting in a philosophical dead end.(24 minutes) - 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)
- 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)
- Victorian ideas about belief and doubt —
FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes) - What is lost with labor-saving devices — Romano Guardini on what is lost when cultural pursuits eclipse natural order
- How fantasy restores the world — In this 2019 lecture, Alison Milbank shows how fantasy can help restore to us a vision of human flourishing that counters the atomization and meaninglessness of modern life. (43 minutes)
- The (super)natural theology of fairy-tales — Alison Milbank describes Chesterton’s belief that story-telling is an affirmation of transcendent meaning
- 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) - Technology and the kingdom of God —
FROM VOL. 63 Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes) - 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)
- 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)
- Goodness, truth, and conscience — David Crawford examines Karol Wojtyła’s thought on the relationship between conscience and truth. (37 minutes)
- Diverting language from its richest possibilities —
FROM VOL. 75 Steve Talbott discusses the rich capacities of language and how technology diminishes them. (18 minutes) - 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)
- Is American culture now story-less? — From our archives, Michael Kammen compares popular and mass culture, and Philip Fisher analyzes the idea that new cultural forms inevitably dissolve old ones. (26 minutes)
- 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) - 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)
- Worldliness vs. otherworldliness —
FROM VOL. 38 Sociologist Craig Gay speaks of the charge that Christianity is an otherworldly religion. (12 minutes)