PREVIEW
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Guests heard on Volume 72
John Polkinghorne, author of Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality, on lessons for theology learned from the inductive nature of the work of science
Francesca Aran Murphy, author of Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, on the efforts of 20th-century Catholic and French philosopher Étienne Gilson to reconcile faith and reason
James Hitchcock, author of The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, Volume 1: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses, on the history of the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding religious practice and liberty
Wilfred McClay, reviewer of two of the biographies about Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) published during last year’s bicentennial celebration of the author, on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s vision of the intractability of human failings and the possibilities of the American experiment
Philip McFarland, author of Hawthorne in Concord, on how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sensitivity to the darker side of human nature makes him perennially instructive
David Hackett Fischer, author of Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, on the history of how Americans have understood and symbolized freedom and liberty
Wilfred McClay, on the theme of place and communal obligation in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing
Related reading and listening
- St. Irenaeus against the Gnostics — In this reading of an essay by theologian Khaled Anatolios, St. Irenaeus is remembered for his synthesis of faith and reason. (52 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)
- When is civil disobedience necessary? — Douglas Farrow examines the relation between “the kings of the earth” and the law of Christ, particularly when governmental law is exercised without reference to natural or divine law. (49 minutes)
- The gift of objective reality — Moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan makes an argument for the consistency of the idea of law when it is conceived in a theological context. (40 minutes)
- Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
- Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
- 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
- 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 Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 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)
- The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
- In the image of our devices? — In light of the history of the meaning of intellectus, D. C. Schindler questions the use of the word “intelligence” to describe systems employing large language models. (18 minutes)
- Community, the giver of freedom — Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon on why suspicion about big government shouldn’t take the form of autonomous individualism
- Freeing dogma from arcane captivity — Dorothy L. Sayers argues that chattering about “Christian values” while ignoring theology is pointless
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
- Freedom from the nature of things? — Leon Kass on the pressure exerted by the authority of science to embrace reductionistic materialism
- 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)
- 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)
- Light from Neither the East nor the West — Ken Myers reads an essay by theologian John Betz titled “Light from Neither the East nor the West.” It is the third of three essays by Betz in which he distinguishes a Christian understanding of freedom from the conventional modern definitions. (41 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)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 156 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Kimbell Kornu, Paul Tyson, Mark Noll, David Ney, William C. Hackett, and Marian Schwartz
- Science, the only reliable leader (but to where?) — Stephen Gaukroger on the replacement of political, social, and cultural goals with scientific, technological, and economic ones
- Recovering natural philosophy — Science teacher Ravi Scott Jain discusses natural philosophy, the “love of wisdom in the realm of nature,” as the overarching discipline in the sciences. (21 minutes)
- Freedom on Holiday: The Genealogy of a Cultural Revolution — In this second of three essays, John Betz argues that freedom for the sake of conforming to the Good has been replaced by freedom as the space to choose whatever we want. (52 minutes)
- Rejecting “two-tiered” Thomism — FROM VOL. 155 David Bentley Hart on how “two-tier Thomism” deviates from historic Christian understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. (42 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 155 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Donald Kraybill, Thaddeus Kozinski, David Bentley Hart, Nigel Biggar, Ravi Scott Jain, and Jason Baxter
- Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
- Freedom, real and counterfeit — D. C. Schindler contrasts the classical and Christian understanding of freedom with the modern understanding of freedom, and explains how true freedom is a condition of harmony with reality. (59 minutes)
- We Hold These Freedoms: Modern, Postmodern, Christian — An essay by John Betz explores the theological grounding of real freedom. He argues that human freedom cannot be understood apart from divine freedom. (36 minutes)
- God is not Zeus; you are not Prometheus — Ron Highfield addresses those who doubt Christianity’s goodness, especially as regards modern assumptions about identity, freedom, and dignity. (24 minutes)
- With Eastern eyes — Paul Valliere and Vigen Guroian discuss questions of law, politics, and human nature from the Orthodox tradition. (34 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
- Power to the people — Nathan O. Hatch on the DIY spirit of early American Christianity
- 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
- Words of truth, words of Life — Hans Urs von Balthasar on the primitive (but now largely lost) unity of theology and sanctity
- 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)
- 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)
- Conventional “charismatic” speech, in service of the Zeitgeist — Richard Stivers on how the rhetoric of democracy invites tyranny
- Questioning the world’s assumptions down to their very roots — John Milbank on the need for a more robust apologetics
- 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)
- 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)
- Cosmology without God — Modern science is practiced in the context of beliefs that are intrinsically metaphysical and theological, even though practitioners of science claim (and usually genuinely believe) that their disciplines are philosophically neutral. David Alcalde challenges such claims within a sub-field of astrophysics. (21 minutes)
- The theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar — Theologian Rodney Howsare unpacks the dense but important theology of Hans Urs von Balthazar, revealing how the “God question” is implicit or explicit in all human questions. (14 minutes)
- The first virtue of citizenship: Taking the law seriously — Oliver O’Donovan reflects on how the reality of the Kingship of Christ must be affirmed as a present reality
- Reasoning about values — Revisiting a 1974 text that examined the mutual animosities of the 1960s
- Diagnosing our political conflicts — Michael Hanby explains why the modern pursuit of freedom — obeying its founding logic — has taken such a destructive turn. (36 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)