Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 91

Related reading and listening

• 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
• Liberalism’s self-destructive dynamic — T. S. Eliot on the social need to move toward something and not just away
• A richer, deeper view of human dignity — FROM VOL. 98 Moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender examines the question of human dignity and its place within political discourse. (25 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)
• What hath “manifest destiny” wrought? — Daniel Walker Howe on the eschatological imagination that encouraged American expansion
• Post-Christian America and the “unlimited technological future” — George Parkin Grant on technology and the Puritan legacy of “unflinching wills”
• Recognizing the Puritan flavor of “America” — George McKenna on the originally theocentric vision for the American vocation
• 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)
• The theological significance of current events — FROM VOL. 65 George Marsden discusses how Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) understood world history and the American experience. (14 minutes)
• Countering American apathy toward history — FROM VOL. 124 Historian John Fea discusses how American and Protestant individualism continues to influence our orientation toward the past. (22 minutes)
• “Detachment as a whole way of life” — FROM VOL. 85 Professor Christopher Shannon discusses how early twentieth-century social scientists encouraged the American idea that individual identity works against communal membership. (17 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)
• The fraught marriage of liberty and equality — In this essay, Patrick Deneen examines Alexis de Tocqueville’s complex and insightful portrait of “democratic man” living in the context of perpetual societal tension between the excesses of liberty and equality. (39 minutes)
• Laity as the “muscle” behind world-building — Andrew Willard Jones calls for the renewal of a robust understanding of the role of the laity in actively shaping the world. (39 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)
• Nature’s intelligibility — In this lecture, Christopher Blum argues that scientists need to regain a full appreciation of nature’s intelligibility, as they are apt to lose sight of reality due to the reductionism produced by their theories. (31 minutes)
• The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art — FROM VOL. 88 Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
• The Bully Pulpit: Presidential Rhetoric and True Leadership — Elvin Lim talks about the decline of the content of presidential rhetoric and its consequences to democracy. (49 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)
• Touch’d with a coal from heav’n — Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology
• How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
• William Cowper: Reconciling the Heart with the Head — Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)
• Alexis de Tocqueville’s penetrating review of America — FROM VOL. 91 Hugh Brogan and Daniel Ritchie discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights into American society, government, and character. (26 minutes)
• Approaches to knowing — FROM VOL. 104 Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge. (21 minutes)
• Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters — FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
• The political wisdom of Edmund Burke — FROM VOL. 28 Daniel Ritchie discusses the enduring political wisdom of British statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke (1729–1797). (13 minutes)
• Literature for wisdom, not propaganda — FROM VOL. 23 Daniel Ritchie provides a constructive alternative to the ideological captivity of literature and literary studies. (13 minutes)
• Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
• “A society of friends at work” — Political philosopher Andrew Willard Jones lays out a robust vision for a just society in which virtues are formed in an analogical manner through relational obedience and trust. (71 minutes)
• When is a market “free”? — William T. Cavanaugh argues for a richer conception of freedom than the reductionist one promoted by economist Milton Friedman. (44 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)
• Creation’s goodness and human faithfulness — J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens on Wendell Berry’s understanding of how Creation is a gift with certain givenness
• Productivity or thrift? — Wendell Berry contrasts an economy of productivity (which invites extravagance) and an economy of thrift (which takes care of things)
• The destructive logic of short-term thinking — Wendell Berry on the perils of ignoring the nature of Nature
• Only a dying civilization neglects its dead — Historian Dermot Quinn discusses the work of fellow historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970). (15 minutes)
• 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)
• The danger of not defining “freedom” — Richard Bauckham insists that an adequate understanding of freedom requires recognition of God as the ground of true human freedom
• Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
• 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)
• 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)
• Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
• Freedom as conformity to reality — W. Bradford Littlejohn summarizes the definitions of liberty offered by Richard Bauckham and Oliver O’Donovan
• 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)
• The dance of law and freedom — Calvin Stapert on the experience of joyous order in Bach’s music
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
• 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)
• Political community and the good — D. C. Schindler on why political life is inevitably “a particular interpretation of the highest human good”
• Distributist & sustainable economics — Two interview from 2010: John C. Médaille summarizes how distributist economics differs from both capitalism and socialism. Then Herman Daly discusses the danger of economic theory abstracted from the actual stuff of Creation. (44 minutes)