PREVIEW
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Guests heard on Volume 70
W. Wesley McDonald, author of Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology, on the significance of Russell Kirk’s themes of the “permanent things” and “the moral imagination”
C. Ben Mitchell, co-editor of Aging, Death, and The Quest for Immortality, on law, wisdom, and the possibilities of pastoral guidance on bioethical decisions
Carl Elliott, author of Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, on the medical industry’s move from healing to enhancing self-esteem and identity formation
Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, on the rise of “evolutionary ethics,” the embrace toward ethical relativism, and the slide toward eugenic
Christine Rosen, author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, on how and why early twentieth-century American religious leaders encouraged eugenics in the name of moral progress
Dana Gioia, on the decline in literary reading in America and on the cultural loss it signifies
C. Ben Mitchell on the benefits of living in multi-generational communities and on why and how the Church should be more welcoming toward the elderly
Related reading and listening
- Cosmetic surgery and human perfectibility — Elizabeth Haiken examines the shift that occurred in 20th century America from a focus on developing character to a focus on developing “personality” and achieving physical perfection. (19 minutes)
- Chameleon karma: the fate of plasticity — Cultural historian Jeffrey L. Meikle on how the ubiquity of plastic affected the moral imagination of 20th-century Americans
- Torrential winds of doctrine — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the “dictatorship of relativism”
- Getting outside of our heads — FROM VOL. 128Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford explores what forms the self, arguing that individuality is an earned competence achieved through habits of submission to various tasks, traditions, and authorities. (20 minutes)
- Prudence in politics — FROM VOL. 146
Henry T. Edmondson, III talks about Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of political life, which was influenced by a range of thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk. (19 minutes)
- On The Abolition of Man — FROM VOL. 154 Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
- 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)
- Gioia, Dana — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Dana Gioia is the former Poet Laureate of California. An internationally recognized poet and critic, he is the author of six collections of verse.
- Elliott, Carl — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Carl Elliott trained in medicine before completing a PhD in philosophy. He is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota.
- Weikart, Richard — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Richard Weikart is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at California State University, Stanislaus.
- Rosen, Christine — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Christine Rosen is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism.
- 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)
- Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 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)
- 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
- On moral authority and medicine — Continuing our time travel back to 1992, we hear two more interviews from the pilot tape for the Mars Hill Tapes, with sociologist James Davison Hunter and bioethicist Nigel Cameron. (28 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)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
- How should we then die? — Stanley Hauerwas asks how the fear of death shapes the practice of medicine
- Thinking Christianly about the body — Theologian and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender discusses some of the themes he explores in two of his books: Body, Soul and Bioethics; and Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. (19 minutes)
- Our commerce, our selves — Thomas Frank argues that the anti-establishment ethos of the counterculture was not a new phenomenon in the 1960s but was already present in corporate America long before the Beatles showed up. (23 minutes)
- “. . . improvising a raft after shipwreck . . . ” — Gil Bailie on symptoms and sources of the postmodern self adrift
- The existence of the “self” — Joseph E. Davis talks about the concept of identities and why some social theorists have questioned the very existence of selves. (14 minutes)
- Taking words into the soul — Eugene Peterson on reading as an art of chewing, savoring, and digesting
- Reading reflectively during Lent — As Lent is a time of more deliberate reflection and renewal, Marilyn McEntyre talks about the kind of attentiveness to words that can refresh and enable readers. (21 minutes)
- Reading with our whole might — Marilyn McEntyre on engaging texts receptively
- Becoming a serious and receptive reader — David Lyle Jeffrey offers a thoughtful reading of C. S. Lewis’s account of thoughtful reading
- “Death lies at the heart of modern medicine” — Dr. Kimbell Kornu, who teaches health care ethics and palliative medicine at St. Louis University, talks about why modern medicine can’t adequately explain health or suffering, even as doctors promote health and try to eliminate suffering. (28 minutes)
- Medicine and the narrative of progress — Jeffrey Bishop explains how modern Western medicine is intertwined with politics and technology within a vision of progress that has an eschatological quality to it. (25 minutes)
- Quarantine’s lessons: patience, hope, the Church, medicine, and more — In the first in a projected series of Features, Stanley Hauerwas shares some thoughts about lessons to be learned while living under quarantine. (13 minutes)
- Is there a transcendent order of which we are a part? — Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the spirit of the (hyper) modern world is one of relentless disposability and of denial of a transcendent order to the cosmos. (36 minutes)
- Dana Gioia on poets and poetry — In this collection of interview excerpts, poet and essayist Dana Gioia comments on the literary significance and distinctive voices of Longfellow, Donne, Hopkins, and other fellow poets. (25 minutes)
- Six recent books worthy of note — Ken Myers shares a summary of six recent books that we want our listeners to know about but whose authors we won’t be interviewing. (15 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
- 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)
- Words made audible, dwelling among us — Abigail Williams describes how, in the eighteenth century, the practices of reading aloud survived even as private, silent reading was becoming more common. (19 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
- Dana Gioia on Donald Hall — California’s current Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia, talks with Ken Myers about the life and work of Donald Hall, U. S. Poet Laureate 2006–2007). (19 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 135 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Bob Cutillo, Hans Boersma, Dana Gioia, Matthew Levering, Bruce Gordon, and Markus Rathey
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 118 — FEATURED GUESTS: Gilbert Meilaender, Ron Highfield, Mark Mitchell, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Helen Rhee, and Peter Brown
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 115 — FEATURED GUESTS: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Andrew Davison, Adrian Pabst, Gary Colledge, Linda Lewis, and Thomas Bergler
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 111 — FEATURED GUESTS: Siva Vaidhyanathan, John Fea, Ross Douthat, Ian Ker, Larry Woiwode, and Dana Gioia
