Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 92

Related reading and listening

• 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)
• “A sign of contradiction” — In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 minutes)
• Education that counters alienation — In this lecture, Jeanne Schindler explores how digital technologies warp not only education but our experience of being human. (30 minutes)
• Education vs. conditioning — Education necessarily involves metaphysical and theological preconditions, and Michael Hanby argues that our current education crisis is a result of society rejecting these preconditions. (41 minutes)
• Knowing by heart — D. C. Schindler reflects on Plato’s idea of “conversion” in education, assuming the symbol of the heart as the center of man. (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)
• Education as a pilgrimage and a mystery — In this lecture, James Matthew Wilson gives a compelling argument for understanding the role of a literary or poetic education as an immersion of the whole being in truth and beauty. (43 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)
• Submission to mathematical truth — In this lecture, Carlo Lancellotti argues that integration of the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of mathematics is needed in a robust liberal arts mathematics curriculum. (25 minutes)
• Music, silence, and the order of Creation — In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how it is that our participation in harmonic beauty in music is a kind of participation in the life of God, in Whom all order and beauty coheres and is sustained. (61 minutes)
• The need for robust Christian intellectual life — In this lecture, Robert Benne surveys the contemporary landscape in which Christian scholars attempt to integrate their faith and their intellectual life. (43 minutes)
• The gift of liturgical time — In this lecture, Gregory Wilbur explains how liturgy and liturgical time align us to the rhythms and order of Creation, forming us as disciples. (45 minutes)
• Seasons and everyday saints — Sylvie Vanhoozer introduces a French Advent tradition that involves a community of “little saints” whose stories have something to teach us about following Christ throughout the year. (28 minutes)
• Critiquing “empire criticism” — Allan Bevere and Peter Leithart evaluate “empire criticism,” a way of reading the New Testament with an anti-imperial focus. (36 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 163 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Youngblood, R. J. Snell, Nicholas Denysenko, Nigel Biggar, Robert McNamara, and David Cayley
• The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
• Embodied knowledge — FROM VOL. 121 James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes)
• 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)
• Bearing well the burdens of the past, present, and future — Louis Markos shows how great literature like the Iliad links us to the human story and strengthens us to live fully and well. (65 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)
• 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)
• Festivity and the goodness of Creation — Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)
• Unmasking claims of “secular neutrality” — Lesslie Newbigin on the Church’s prophetic duty concerning public life
• The kingdom of God has public consequences — Lesslie Newbigin on the subversiveness of the Church’s message to the world
• The integration of theoretical and mythic intelligence — FROM VOL. 156 William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes)
• What higher education forgot — FROM VOL. 84 Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
• The formation of affections — FROM VOL. 101 James K. A. Smith explains how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy. (15 minutes)
• A Christian philosophy of integrated education — FROM VOL. 61 Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
• Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
• The social irrelevance of secular higher education — FROM VOL. 85 Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
• The history of Christianity and higher education — FROM VOL. 50 In tracing Christianity’s relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God’s ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
• Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
• Sports in America — FROM VOL. 21 Robert Higgs looks at the history of sports in American experience and at how organized religion has interacted with that history. (12 minutes)
• In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 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
• Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
• A theology of eating — FROM VOL. 113 Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
• Honoring the pigness of pigs — FROM VOL. 137 Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
• An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
• What does it mean to be a creature? — Canon-theologian Simon Oliver explains how and why the doctrine of Creation is cardinal and must frame all theology. (62 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
• The ecstasy of the act of knowing — Theologian Paul Griffiths situates our creaturely knowing within the framework of the relation between God and Creation
• How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
• On wonder, wisdom, worship, and work — Classical educator Ravi Jain dives deeply into the nature, purpose, and interconnectedness of the liberal, common, and fine arts. (43 minutes)
• “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
• Divorcing the spirit of the age — Thomas C. Oden on overcoming the theological faddism of the late twentieth century
• 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)
• Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)