Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 73

Related reading and listening

• “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
• Cleansing sea breezes — Thomas C. Oden argues that rather than being conformed to contemporary ideological trends, we should be informed by 2000 years of the Church’s wisdom. And Darrell Amundsen corrects some false claims about the early Church’s views on suicide. (27 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
• Wood, Ralph C. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Ralph C. Wood is Emeritus Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
• Srigley, Susan — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Susan Srigley is a Professor in the department of Religions and Cultures at Nipissing University (North Bay, Ontario, Canada). Her research focuses on ethics, imagination, and literature.
• At the trailhead of a long trek — Jessica Hooten Wilson on the discovery of a literary remnant
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
• 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
• Human dignity, cosmic hierarchies — Political scientist Robert Kraynak on how Christianity opposes worldly hierarchies with hierarchies of its own
• Challenging the “gospel of democracy” — Robert Kraynak argues that assumptions many modern Christians hold about liberal democracy are rooted in some false ideas about the nature and purpose of civil government. (46 minutes)
• Recognizing a frayed tapestry — Hans Boersma summarizes the theological concerns shared by the members of the nouvelle théologie movement
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• “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)
• Remembering the networks of giving and receiving — O. Carter Snead on the disabling assumptions of expressive individualism in public bioethics
• Art and the truth of things — Joseph Nicolello explains the origins and themes of his imaginary dialogue between Jacques Maritain and Flannery O’Connor. (28 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)
• 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)
• Equality and the (modern) dilemma of authority — Sociologist Richard Stivers explains the confused understanding in modern culture about equality, individualism, and authority. (16 minutes)
• “A roaming unrest of the spirit” — Theologian Reinhard Hütter argues that the contemporary plague of pornography is a symptom of a deep spiritual apathy. (28 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)
• Against secular smugness — Ralph C. Wood on the theological threads in the work of P. D. James
• The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
• Analyzing the current indictment of Christopher Columbus — Robert Royal offers thoughtful listeners an alternative to the ignorant and heated indictment of Christopher Columbus that has become fashionable in recent months. (22 minutes)
• The paradoxes of therapeutic culture — Stephen Gardner and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn discuss Philip Reiff’s diagnosis of how psychology replaced the social roles of religion, morality, and custom, redefining the meaning of what is public. (39 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 147 — FEATURED GUESTS: R. Jared Staudt, Jason Peters, D. C. Schindler, Craig Gay, Mary Hirschfeld, and Patrick Samway
• “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)
• A Lenten meditation on gardening — Theologian Vigen Guroian reads “Lenten Spring,” a gardener’s meditation on the anticipation of new life, material and spiritual. (16 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 146 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Mitchell, Hans Boersma, Henry T. Edmondson, III, Brian Clayton, Douglas Kries, Conor Sweeney, and Carole Vanderhoof
• Freedom and equality according to Flannery O’Connor — Three guests discuss Flannery O’Connor’s ideas: Henry T. Edmondson, III, on O’Connor’s understanding of political life; Ralph C. Wood, on O’Connor as a “hill-billy Thomist”; and Susan Srigley, on O’Connor’s sacramental and incarnational fiction. (18 minutes)
• Fischer, Hart, and Highfield on freedom — Three past guests on the Journal explore the meaning of freedom and some common modern misunderstandings of the concept — errors with real consequences. (22 minutes)
• Virtue and myth in Middle-earth — Ralph C. Wood and Bradley Birzer discuss Christian wisdom, virtues, and the strength of myth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s created world of Middle-earth. (33 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
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141 — FEATURED GUESTS: Grant Wythoff, Susanna Lee, Gerald R. Mcdermott, Carlos Eire, Kelly Kapic, and James Matthew Wilson
• 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
• John F. Desmond: “Walker Percy and Suicide” — John Desmond uses the novels of Walker Percy to critique the increasing trend in today’s medical fields and in secular society as a whole to affirm, even if tacitly, that suicide is a decision belonging to each individual as a right. (24 minutes)
• How radical is our individualism? — Michael Martin on the late medieval origins of our current confusion
• Word becomes flesh, Reality becomes fact — Henri de Lubac on the Incarnation and history