Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 75

Related reading and listening

1. 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)
2. “You love the man at once” — Marianne Wright on the generosity and geniality of George MacDonald
3. Perceiving truths that dazzle gradually — Rolland Hein on lessons from George MacDonald about the imagination as a spiritual faculty
4. We wonder as they wander — Daniel Gabelman on the spiritual geography of George MacDonald’s fairyland
5. 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)
6. Victorian ideas about belief and doubt — FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes)
7. “Prophet of holiness” — Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
8. Beauty, the body, and the “true self” — FROM VOL. 62 Lilian Calles Barger shows the necessity and beauty of healthy embodiment and challenges gnostic ideas found in the church that particularly distort the experiences of women. (15 minutes)
9. Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
10. 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)
11. Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
12. Multi-leveled language and active spiritual engagement — FROM VOL. 95 Eugene Peterson talks about how Jesus spent most of his time speaking normally and conversationally, and how the Spirit infused this normal speech. (14 minutes)
13. Diverting language from its richest possibilities — FROM VOL. 75 Steve Talbott discusses the rich capacities of language and how technology diminishes them. (18 minutes)
14. The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
15. Apprehending the enduring things — Vigen Guroian explains how children’s literature has the capacity to birth the moral imagination in our children, affirming for them the permanent things. (53 minutes)
16. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
17. “A state of divine carelessness” — FROM VOL. 121 Daniel Gabelman attempts to correct the notion that George MacDonald prizes seriousness and sobriety. (20 minutes)
18. Theological realism — Kevin J. Vanhoozer discusses theologian T. F. Torrance’s understanding of the positive relation between science and theology. (52 minutes)
19. A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
20. Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
21. Christopher Dawson: Chronicler of Christendom’s Rise and Fall — Dermot Quinn discusses historian Christopher Dawson’s meta-historical perspective and his wisdom about what makes cultures healthy or unhealthy. (54 minutes)
22. How the truth finds itself when confronted with error — Hans Urs von Balthasar on the intense radiance emanating from the writings of St. Irenaeus as he confronted heresies
23. Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
24. What makes a great historian? — John Lukacs on how historian Christopher Dawson displayed a proper nostalgia
25. From democracy to bureaucracy — Historian John Lukacs on the challenges of living at the End of an Age
26. Ideas and historical consequences — Historian John Lukacs (1924–2019) discusses the relationship between institutions and character, popular sentiment versus public opinion, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the very nature of studying history. (36 minutes)
27. The historian’s communal role as storyteller — FROM VOL. 127 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)
28. Three historians on history — FROM VOL. 31 This Archive Feature presents interviews with three historians who discuss changes in historical studies. (33 minutes)
29. The past as presence, not souvenir — Historian Christopher Lasch on the importance of recognizing our dependence on the past
30. “How deep the problems go” — FROM VOL. 103Eric Miller discusses the late historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s intense commitment to understand the logic of American cultural confusion. (20 minutes)
31. 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)
32. The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
33. 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)
34. Malvasi, Mark G. — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Mark G. Malvasi teaches American and European history at Randolph-Macon College. He is the author or editor of nine books and dozens of essays, reviews, and editorials.
35. The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
36. Christ, the key to human meaning — Gil Bailie on how the coming of Christ affirmed the intelligibility of human history (and why the abandonment of Christ invites unreason)
37. In the image of an Imaginer — Dorothy L. Sayers on the inevitability of analogical language about God (and everything else)
38. Freeing dogma from arcane captivity — Dorothy L. Sayers argues that chattering about “Christian values” while ignoring theology is pointless
39. Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
40. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
41. A George MacDonald symposium — Excerpts from four interviews talking about the work of George MacDonald: Michael Di Fuccia, Marianne Wright, David Fagerberg, and Daniel Gabelman. (28 minutes)
42. George MacDonald on the imagination — Readings from two essays by George MacDonald about how the human imagination is “made in the image” of God’s imagination. (20 minutes)
43. Living into focus — As our lives are increasingly shaped by technologically defined ways of living, Arthur Boers discusses how we might choose focal practices that counter distraction and isolation. (32 minutes)
44. Albert Borgmann, R.I.P. — Albert Borgmann argues that, despite its promise to the contrary, technology fails to provide meaning, significance, and coherence to our lives. (47 minutes)
45. Before Church and State — Andrew Willard Jones challenges some of the conventional paradigms of thinking about political order, arguing that modern assumptions of the relationship between Church and state color how we understand history. (54 minutes
46. With Eastern eyes — Paul Valliere and Vigen Guroian discuss questions of law, politics, and human nature from the Orthodox tradition. (34 minutes)
47. 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)
48. Art as aestheticism, love as eroticism, politics as totalitarianism — Augusto Del Noce on the “technological mindset” and the loss of the sense of transcendence
49. The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
50. Words of truth, words of Life — Hans Urs von Balthasar on the primitive (but now largely lost) unity of theology and sanctity